


Chunks of Worm

by VigoGrimborne



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: One Shot Collection, Ward Spoilers, Worm Spoilers (Parahumans)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29688264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VigoGrimborne/pseuds/VigoGrimborne
Summary: A collection of Worm-related one-shots. Some will be AUs, some will be alt-power AUs, some will be both, and some neither. All will have a self-contained story, and I'll be hitting all sorts of different genres and themes. T-rated, though individual chapters may have additional warnings on them, as necessary. This IS Worm, after all.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 41





	1. Part of the System

_**Author's Note** _ **: The bare essentials: This is a collection of Worm snippets, ideas that I want to explore, covering anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 words each, and generally striving to tell a small, self-contained story within that space. Most will be one-shots, most will be alt-powers or AUs, but there will be exceptions to both rules. For now, please enjoy my first official foray into the world of Worm fanfiction! Not knowing what, if anything, has been changed from canon is part of the fun of this one, so I won't say just yet.**

 **Also, for any of my readers who follow me for my works in another fandom and are investigating this strange new thing I've posted: Turn back unless you've had the experience of reading** _**Worm** _ **. This is** _**not** _ **a fictional universe you want to spoil for yourself by reading fanfiction first, and this one-shot in particular assumes prior knowledge of the characters, terminology, and canon storyline. On the bright side,** _**Worm** _ **is freely available, just search 'parahumans' and 'Worm' and go to the wordpress site that pops up.**

**Now, on with the one-shot.**

_**AU: Part of the System** _

Shadow Stalker loathed console duty with a passion she usually reserved for targets she could maim. The console, a gleaming monolith to inaction and cowardice by helping from safety, mocked her with its invincibility. She couldn't tranquilize it, couldn't arrest it, and couldn't justify mangling it with any of the other tools at her disposal. She couldn't even phase through it; all the electricity coursing through its eldritch Tinkertech interior would fry her in an instant.

She considered hiring a Tinker to craft a computer virus meant to inflict pain on previously unfeeling circuitry as she flicked through the various channels and watched Kid Win and Gallant patrolling in the rich part of town. Sure, it would maybe get her in trouble if they traced it back to her, but as far as she knew, 'vandalism' wasn't on the list of conditions that would break her probation. Getting revenge on the machine that she was currently tied to might be worth it… If only she could be sure it wouldn't be replaced within hours. She would have to incapacitate Kid Win and Armsmaster first, and maybe Squealer just to be safe…

Though if Squealer somehow got her drug-addled brain on the topic of repairing the console, what came out the other end might be something Sophia was justified in hunting down and peppering with her _real_ arrows, so there would be an upside.

"Console," Kid Win said, "We're checking in. Are you there?"

Sophia noticed that Kid Win and Gallant were back at the Rig, heading inside. "Why?" She was fairly sure they were supposed to be patrolling for a lot longer than that; they'd barely been out an hour.

"You really should read your weekly news emails, Shadow Stalker," Gallant sighed. "We're supposed to be meeting the new Protectorate member in ten minutes. All of us."

Sophia responded by cutting off the line between them and the console, quickly hammering through the closing routine – slacking on the procedure would just land her more procedure, it wasn't worth it – and standing from the hated seat. At least this meeting was getting her off console duty early.

A quick search on her phone for her PRT email account – which would be dusty with disuse if email could gather dust – yielded the weekly update from Armsmaster. It was as dry and filled with pointless information as she remembered, but at the bottom there was a notice about a meeting involving… Yes, a new hero being introduced to them. And something about an administration change, but that was probably just Armsmaster taking time out of his busy schedule to somehow put down Dauntless on a technicality.

The meeting was in the conference room just across the hall from where she was. She slapped her mask on, checked her crossbow, both to be sure it was in good order and to be sure she hadn't left any bloodstains after her last patrol, and made her way there, ghosting through the door to make an entrance.

Her entrance was wasted on those already present; of the Wards, only Gallant was looking in her direction. He gave her a welcoming smile, the overly emotional sap that he was. She ignored his pathetic existence and claimed a chair near the door, next to Aegis.

"Anyone know why we're here?" Clockblocker asked from across the table. He turned from left to right, dramatically considering everyone present. "I'm only here because Vista dragged me across the hall."

Vista scowled at him. "You should read your emails," she said firmly.

"I was just telling Shadow Stalker that," Gallant chimed in. "We should all pay more attention to our official email accounts. I know it's hard keeping track of it sometimes, but there's a lot of important information you miss if you ignore it."

"I'm an extrovert, I like interacting with people," Clockblocker whined. "Computers aren't people, unless someone gets a Tinker drunk and points them in the right direction…"

The door chose that moment to swing open again, revealing Armsmaster, Miss Militia, and…

Sophia twisted in her chair to get a better look at the third costumed figure. White interwoven mesh gleamed from behind pale yellow armor panels, covering the joints and vulnerable points of a tall, thin figure. A full facemask with matching white and yellow highlights offered a bright, cheery, but slightly inhuman visage, one with yellow-tinted lenses built in. A trail of scale-like overlapping plates covered the back of their head, merging helmet and costume in a way Sophia could tell was designed to look good while offering absolutely no advantages to an enemy in close-quarters combat.

Whoever this was, they'd clearly had to make sacrifices when they went to the costume design department. The overall image was firmly on the 'bright, appealing,' side of things, far more than any self-respecting hero would ever allow. In exchange, it would be practical, decent in a fight, and was so obscuring almost nothing about the wearer could be determined from appearance alone, save for their height. This was someone more concerned with function than appearance.

Armsmaster and Miss Militia stopped at the front of the conference room, in front of the whiteboard. The new hero stood between them, his or her eyes obscured behind those same yellow lenses.

"Wards, meet Weaver," Miss MIlitia announced. "Weaver, the Wards. Aegis, Gallant, Browbeat, Vista, Kid Win, Shadow Stalker, and Clockblocker, in no particular order."

The other Wards smiled, waved, or cracked crappy jokes. Shadow Stalker crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. Her only hope for this new hero was that he or she would be the right _kind_ of hero, but that was unlikely. Folding to the Image department and prioritizing defense precluded that almost immediately.

" _Wards_." The voice was a buzzing undertone, a chirping overtone, a mingling of a thousand noises into one semi-coherent set of sounds. Sophia found herself reaching for her crossbow on instinct alone, though she forced herself to do no more than put a hand on it, ready to draw. " _Good to meet you_."

"I may have to tweak your helmet's pitch modifier before you go out in public," Armsmaster remarked. "Stick to the minimal setting for now."

"Probably a good idea," Weaver remarked. Her voice was much less distorted, but a buzzing undertone still emphasized every word in a peculiar way.

"Where do I sign up for a helmet that makes me sound like that?" Clockblocker blurted out.

"In my case," Weaver replied, "the helmet is just helping me be more clear." She waved a hand vaguely, indicating her current, only slightly unnatural voice. "That sound is all my own."

"Oh, cool," Clockblocker replied, shrinking back a little. Sophia could practically see the thoughts crawling through his dense head. If she sounded like that _normally_ , and her costume covered up everywhere she might show even the slightest hint of skin…

"Weaver will be announced to the public next Tuesday," Armsmaster said stiffly, breaking the awkward silence with all the subtlety of Skidmark on a rampage, if less profanely. "Additionally, the Director and I have decided to put her directly in charge of the Wards, as opposed to the split responsibilities Miss Militia and I have held prior to now."

"Why?" Vista blurted out, before wincing and shaking her head. "Not that I'm objecting," she said, trying and failing to sound older than she actually was, "but Weaver is new, right? Not a transfer from somewhere else?"

"It's because she's new," Miss Militia explained. "She'll be taking on the role of Ward supervisor in a much more active capacity than any of us can manage with our other responsibilities."

"I think," Weaver added in her only slightly uncanny voice, "that the idea is I can jump right in and learn the extra responsibilities alongside all of the other things I need to learn anyway."

"Weaver will be operating under my oversight for the first six months," Armsmaster assured them, "but she will be operating in full capacity. I'll send you all a longer explanation once we're done here, so you know exactly what her position involves, but this meeting isn't long enough to go over that."

"Whatever," was Shadow Stalker's muttered opinion on the subject. A new hero or Miss Militia or Armsmaster, the only thing that changed was the personality enforcing the asinine restrictions the Wards worked under. Nothing would change, and Weaver would be sucked into patrols and more active duty the moment she finished the mountains of training she was undoubtedly having heaped on her.

"Well, as the current Wards leader, I'm looking forward to getting to know you," Aegis volunteered, reaching up for his helmet–

Weaver held out a hand. "Don't do that," she requested.

Aegis stared at her, his hands still on his helmet. "Why not?" he asked. "We're colleagues, it's–"

"It's not something I'm willing to reciprocate," Weaver interrupted, her voice as soft as something so eerie could get. Sophia was _not_ getting used to the sound; the more Weaver talked, the more it set her on edge. "Personal reasons."

That even more firmly cemented Sophia's working assessment, that Weaver was either disfigured by her power, or an outright Case 53. One so uncomfortable with herself that she wanted to hide her appearance even from her allies, and who was humanoid enough that she could feasibly do so. It would have been an interesting combination... If she was interested in cowards.

"What if I don't care if you unmask to me in return?" Aegis asked.

"Then go ahead, but it's your choice," Weaver allowed. "I'd rather you not, though. Not right now."

"Unmasking can wait," Gallant suggested. "What do you _want_ to share, Weaver?"

"What's your power?" Kid Win asked, hot on his heels.

"My power…" Weaver spread her arms, and a riot of color spread out from a dozen different places. Butterflies spread their wings all across her armor, bright flashes of color against the brilliant white. An entire flight of butterflies appeared from behind the odd flaps on the back of her neck and circled around her helmet.

"I control bugs," she added, unnecessarily. " _All_ the bugs."

Most of the Wards didn't get what that meant right away; Vista, in particular, was probably straining too hard not to act like the child she was to think about it. Shadow Stalker, though, was not distracted by the colorful cloud, or the way Weaver's two-tone armor was now a rainbow vibrant enough to drive the E88 into a rage.

 _All_ bugs. Including all the ones that PR would never let a hero be associated with, like cockroaches and spiders and centipedes… The horror-movie images that knowledge conjured when she thought of what _she_ could do with it…

Maybe Weaver wouldn't be so bad after all, once she got comfortable and stopped caring so much about the rules. There might be a _real_ predator hidden behind that obscuring costume, something dangerous.

Shadow Stalker certainly hoped so.

* * *

"She's a raging bitch," Sophia ranted, flopping back on her bed. "Stuck-up rule-follower with a stick up her ass and a grudge against anyone _effective_." Her crossbow and costume were both spotless, so she didn't give the pile she had dumped them in any thought beyond shoving it under her bed. Her siblings knew her room was off-limits when she was in it, and when she wasn't, there was nothing for them to find.

"Maybe she really _is_ a bitch," Emma suggested, the phone projecting her voice with a tinny quality to it. Sophia had tossed it on the bed, and it had landed speaker face-down, so the covers were muffling her. Despite not getting _any_ action on her patrol, Sophia was bone-tired, so she didn't have the energy to reach over and flip it right-side up. "You said you've never seen what's under her mask, right? She could be a dog-faced monster for all we know."

"Wouldn't be my guess," Sophia muttered. She'd never so much as seen a spot of skin on the older hero; Weaver was never around except in-costume. If she had shown herself to any of the adult heros, Sophia didn't know about it. But if she had to guess…

"What do you think?" Emma asked. "It's got to be _something_."

"Swarm of bugs," Sophia offered. It wasn't breaking the unwritten rules if she was just speculating. "Just bugs, operating that costume like it's a set of power armor. The most disgusting Changer form ever, except she can't use her powers unless she's in it." Or, even worse, she was always in that form. It could be powerful, Weaver had shown the city exactly how powerful, but the user made it such a worthless waste of power…

"Fireflies for eyes," Emma suggested. "Maggots for insides."

Sophia had to choke out a laugh at that; Emma could be positively _brutal_ at the most random times. "Should have called Taylor all of that. Too bad Weaver's not a Ward, you could have made a thing of it."

"As if that drop-out could be a predator like you," Emma scoffed. "I bet you'll catch her next time you round up the Merchant druggies."

"That'll be never, the way Weaver is riding me," Sophia groaned, her good mood souring. "I thought _Armsmaster_ was bad with following regulations. At least he had his Tinkering to distract him. Weaver _never_ gets distracted." Not from her. When Weaver was on console, she had no chance to slip away, not without getting written up and cited for any number of things before she'd even gotten back from her patrol.

"She'll lighten up," Emma offered. It would have been more reassuring if Sophia didn't know her friend was just parroting back her own overconfident words on the subject back when Weaver was first introduced. It had been a month, and Weaver was only getting worse.

"It's not insecurity," Sophia groaned. "She's the worst kind of naive. Thinks what I do, how I am, is _wrong_. Never mind I'm the best Ward of the lot, it's all about how I _act_. Bitch." Lectures on interacting with civilians, lectures on appropriate force, lectures on following procedure, it was like she had her own talking, judgmental rulebook spouting nonsense at her every time she put a foot wrong! And then there were the punishments, because god forbid she mouth off to a teammate, or slip away on patrol, or put a few thugs in full-body casts in the process of saving someone.

"Maybe she'll walk into something too big for her and get put in her place," Emma suggested vaguely.

"She's not Taylor," Sophia reminded her. "She knows what she's doing." The coward didn't go on patrols all that often, if only because she had a genuine talent for doing paperwork. That was the one good thing about Weaver taking over with the Wards; some of the paperwork they'd all been doing when off-duty was now her responsibility, though it never slowed her down for a minute. The spiders and ants in her little side-office were always working, tracking ink with their little limbs even when Weaver wasn't in the room…

She smiled at the memory of a panicked Clockblocker telling them all about _that_ discovery. Weaver was good for freaking out the more squeamish of her so-called teammates, at least. 'Bug Sister', Clockblocker had called her when they found out she could see and hear through her bugs, and the nickname had stuck. Though most of them seemed to be getting used to her as the weeks passed…

"What did she do today?" Emma asked.

"Weaver?" Sophia let her eyes close of their own accord. "Training, agility drills, 'rescue the civilian'. All the Wards were there, but she made me play the civilian every single time for the first hour." Humiliating, pointless, and obviously a ham-fisted attempt to make her think about being in the position of the victim… As if she didn't know. There was a reason she was a predator, not guileless prey. Once was enough for a lifetime.

"That's stupid," Emma said.

"Then there was a mandatory course on deescalation for us all to take," Sophia continued bitterly. "Like it was a movie, but with no popcorn and questionnaires afterward." Weaver was insistent all of the namby-pamby 'training' videos she had them watch were standard Ward courses Brockton Bay had been ignoring. Sophia highly doubted that; Weaver was just being obnoxious.

"What's deescalation?"

"Talking to people to make them not want to fight, but even stupider than it sounds," Sophia explained. "I don't know, I wasn't paying attention. Weaver got on my case about that, too. Blah blah, negotiation skills increase your options in a potentially dangerous situation, blah blah blah. Even if it did, it increases the options I don't care about. _Then_ I had a patrol with Vista, and wouldn't you know it, she wanted to chatter about the ways she and Weaver can combine their powers, for the _whole_ patrol. Every time I tried to shut the little twerp up, she'd just ignore me and keep talking."

"Sounds rough," Emma remarked. Then she kept talking, her voice brightening up. "I know what will cheer you up. We could go find out what actually happened to Taylor, do some looking. If she's doing something illegal, you really could bust her for it."

Sophia didn't particularly care about Taylor; the girl was gone, and out of sight might as well be nonexistent with such a waste of space. She only mattered insofar as Emma had built herself up around the idea that she was better than her former best friend, and Sophia had been hoping Taylor dropping out would have resolved that little hang-up.

Still, doing something with Emma did sound fun, and if she got to rough somebody up along the way, she could let off some steam. Taylor, a random druggy, whoever. "Yeah, let's do that. Saturday?"

"Sunday, I've got a modeling job on Saturday," Emma replied. "That good with you?"

"Weaver's off on Sunday," Sophia sighed. She would have to take off on Sunday if she wanted to hang out with Emma, shuffle a few things around, and that meant more time under Weaver's watchful plethora of eyes later… "But yeah, I can do that."

* * *

Saturday rolled around, pulled up to the curb in the morning, and proceeded to idle like an old truck whose driver fell asleep after parking. A truck with a faulty 'check engine' light and broken seatbelts digging into the passenger's chest while she sat there and watched the world crawl by…

"How's the English homework going, Shadow Stalker?" Weaver's voice made her twitch, not because it was creepy – which it still was – but because she had grown to truly hate the woman behind the mask. Or the swarm of bugs with a mind in it, whatever Weaver really was.

"Like shit," she answered, slapping her notebook shut before Weaver could see her attempts at an extended metaphor. Weaver was on the other side of the room, standing by door leading out into the hall, but distance didn't really matter with her. "Why do you care?"

"Because you're supposed to be on console for Vista and Browbeat, starting five minutes ago," Weaver replied. "Shoo." The butterflies on her arm fluttered into an arrow pointing at Sophia's technological nemesis, then returned to her armor.

Sophia picked up her mask from where she had left it on the table, and slowly set it into place on her head. She had unmasked to Weaver – everyone had once she gave the okay, simply because it was easier that way – but Weaver had a _thing_ about being in costume when on the console. Something about getting into the mindset… Weaver had a lot of stupid opinions along those lines, like she had read a few workplace management books and taken the drivel contained within to heart.

It was stupid, but Weaver also had the authority to assign all sorts of frustrating, time-wasting punishments, and Sophia was getting fed up with missing patrols, and being stuck on patrols in the safer parts of town when she did go out.

The console loomed against the far wall, complicated and boring. She sat down, logged in, and turned on the comm feed to the two patrolling Wards. According to their GPS signals, they were nowhere interesting, though their scheduled patrol had them skirting past ABB territory near the middle of their route.

Thankfully, they weren't talking; Vista seemed to be doing her 'professional, experienced Ward' routine for anyone who happened to be watching, and Browbeat was a man of few words. Also a man of few lasting memories, but that was his extremely minor Stranger power at work. As it turned out, there was more to him than minor self-biokinesis. It didn't make him any more useful. Maybe if he ever got into a real fight…

Weaver wandered down the hall containing all of the Wards' rooms and knocked on Gallant's door. Sophia hadn't even known he was around, but sure enough, he answered. They exchanged a few words, then he went back into his room. She did the same for Kid Win, who only briefly emerged with a tangle of wires and a soldering iron, then came back out into the main area.

"There's going to be a movie night next Saturday," Weaver remarked as she moved to open the cupboards in the mini-kitchen area. "It was in an email, but I figured I'd tell you."

"Will _you_ be there?" Sophia muttered to herself.

"No," Weaver responded, answering without a pause. "It's a team-building exercise for the Wards. You're invited."

"Do I have to, or is it optional?" she asked. Given the choice, she'd rather go out on a good, non-supervised patrol with that time.

"I'd say it's optional, but you'd never go if I did…" Weaver hummed to herself, an eerie buzzing noise that filled the room. "Your choice."

"Fuck that," Sophia said vehemently.

"Too bad for you," Weaver said. "Don't forget to fill out the after-action report once they're done." She stalked out of the room, her movements just a little too precise and jerky to sit right with Sophia.

Sophia returned her attention to the console… Only to find that Vista and Browbeat had apprehended a duo of particularly idiotic muggers. Which she had missed, though it didn't matter because they were only now asking her to call it in.

She should have been out there… which reminded her that she had plans for Sunday, and mandatory on-base time she needed to have rescheduled. Which meant talking to Weaver.

"God damn it," she muttered as she sent the pre-programmed alert to the Brockton Bay police. Two muggers, apprehended, Ward involvement, no complications, no medical issues, absolutely no desire to talk to Weaver…

Vista and Browbeat sat down on the curb to wait for the police pickup, and Shadow Stalker was officially done with the lethargic, intolerable day she was enduring. She stood, phased through the back of her chair, and decided that if she was going to go talk to Weaver, she was at least going to try and startle the bug bitch.

Weaver's office was two walls and a doorway away from the Wards common room, and while said walls had wires, Sophia's visor told her the only sources of electricity were widely-spaced. Not for her convenience, nobody could be bothered to go through the walls to make things easy for her, just by chance. Which meant it was the work of a moment to cross the hall and float into Weaver's office.

Said office was empty, save for a desk, a filing cabinet with a lock, and a long shelf lined with terrariums. The bugs within were going about what to Sophia looked like their normal, non-Weaver daily lives, meaning Weaver was already out of range somehow. She could move fast when she wanted to.

Snooping in Weaver's office wasn't what she had come for, and part of her knew that if she was caught, she'd be slapped with even more minor punishments and lectures, but she stayed anyway. Digging around in Weaver's stuff was at least something to _do_.

There was a pile of the usual Ward-related paperwork on one corner of her desk, but other than that it was clean. No picture frames, no pencils or pens, just a plain oak slab with many little black marks from bugs messing with ink.

The filing cabinet, on the other hand… Sophia glanced over at the terrariums again, and upon seeing their inhabitants still acting normally, phased her hand into the cabinet. Grabbing things while phased was always a crapshoot, since she could barely _feel_ anything, but she managed it on the first try, claiming a few drab folders.

The folders had titles printed across the front in the sort of stereotypical wide lettering movies had led Sophia to expect would say 'Confidential' or 'Top Secret'. Instead, titles such as 'Discretionary Budget' and 'Disciplinary Procedures' greeted her extremely bored gaze. Boring, pointless, and probably _just_ proprietary enough that she'd get in major trouble for having them. She phased them back into the filing cabinet and crouched to get something from further down the alphabet.

This time, she withdrew a single, extremely thin file. 'Personal Tax Documents', it was labeled. She almost put it back…

But taxes involved identities, names and addresses and maybe even special forms for Case 53s. It was a chance to one-up the bug bitch and find out what she was hiding behind that mask…

It was also illegal, but Sophia wasn't about to let that stop her. She glanced at the terrariums, confirmed that yes, the bugs were still milling about aimlessly, and opened the folder.

A phone rang loudly; she instinctively slapped the folder shut and chucked it into the filing cabinet before realizing that it was her own. Still, that had spooked her, and she didn't feel safe rooting around in her boss's personal life anymore. She phased her head through the door, checked that the coast was clear, and quickly returned to the console, with nobody the wiser.

Her phone buzzed once more as she sat down, and when she checked it she saw she had missed a call from Emma, and just now a text. Emma wanted to know if they were still on for tomorrow, investigating Hebert's whereabouts.

She sent back a quick confirmation, even though she hadn't gotten it sorted out with Weaver yet. At this point, if they didn't find anything on Taylor, she was going to spend that night hunting down thugs to pin to walls solely for the purpose of making herself feel better. Something about this particular day was making her want to claw at her own skin through sheer boredom.

* * *

Hebert's house was a sorry little thing, stuck in a crappy neighborhood and painfully average, but lacking even the semblance of effort put into it. Shutters were old and faded, the front step was broken, and the roof needed minor repairs.

"I can't… climb… like you…" Emma panted as Sophia hauled her by the arm up to a safe perch in the tree across the street. She was wearing what passed for clandestine clothing for her, brand-new sweatpants and an old hoodie with nail polish stains around the sleeves. She clutched a pair of binoculars and her phone, the former for surveillance and the latter for entertainment, or calling the police, whichever was necessary.

Sophia didn't expect to find anything, but she was raring to get going anyway. "Stay put, watch for any sign I've been seen," she instructed. She was feeling her lack of a crossbow, but this wasn't something she could do as Shadow Stalker. "You're sure her father won't be home until late?"

"He still works at the docks, I asked my dad," Emma confirmed. "He's _always_ home late, and he works on Sundays ever since his wife died. Not like Taylor is worth making time for anyway. He's probably staying away from her."

"If she still lives here," Sophia reminded her as she descended. It was cloudy out, and the street was mostly abandoned, but she would feel more secure once she was checking out the house itself, not standing around on the other side of the street.

"Maybe she ran away," Emma theorized, lifting her binoculars to her face. "Go get her, predator."

Sophia casually crossed the street, then circled around the house to the Heberts' left like it was the most natural thing in the world. Once she was safely out of sight in the fenced-off bit of grass that passed for a backyard, she pulled her hood down and carefully passed through the fence.

There was nobody in the Heberts' backyard, and no sign that she had been seen. For all the activity she had seen on this street, she and Emma might be the only ones around, but it was good to be careful. There were lights on inside, shining out from the windows, but that didn't mean anything. Everyone kept their lights on when to do otherwise was to signal to anybody around that one's house was empty and ripe for robbery.

A shape moved in front of one of the lights in a window on the ground floor, and Sophia instinctively crouched, then phased back through the fence, opting instead to stand on her toes and look over. The window was visible, and within, if she squinted, a familiar tall and scrawny figure could be seen.

Minutes of observation, aided by the light silhouetting Taylor, cleared up what Sophia was seeing. Taylor was writing, or drawing, or something that required a pen and paper at a table. She had what looked like a laptop open on the table further back, the screen shining mostly white.

It looked like she was doing her homework, albeit with a laptop… But she hadn't come to school in weeks, and Emma had checked; she hadn't transferred anywhere, either. Whether or not she had officially dropped out, Sophia didn't know, but there was no way Winslow was going the extra mile to provide her with her schoolwork either way.

The laptop was suspicious, too; everything Sophia knew about the Heberts said they wouldn't be able to afford such a thing. They were barely scraping by as it was, and word from Emma was that they'd settled with the school in exchange for Taylor's hospital bills being covered, nothing more.

Sophia was considering returning to Emma with her information when she felt a pinch on her wrist. She shook her hand, but the single, red ant clung doggedly to her, undeterred.

A creeping dread rose over her, one she tried to shake off like she tried to shake off the ant; vehemently, and unsuccessfully. It could be a coincidence; Weaver wasn't _everywhere_ , the odds of her even noticing any of this were miniscule.

Still, she quickly made her way around the house and back across the street.

Emma wasn't in her tree anymore. She was standing on the sidewalk, clutching her binoculars, facing a swarm of butterflies that still somehow managed to loom threateningly. Sophia knew there were other bugs within the depths of the butterfly cloud; that was Weaver's usual method of operation on the rare occasion she went out on patrol. But this was supposed to be her day off.

There was literally no point in trying to get away; if Weaver could see her here, then she would notice her fleeing and assemble a much less friendly bug swarm wherever she tried to go. Sophia trudged across the street to her friend, hoping all the way that Emma hadn't said anything incriminating.

" _As I was saying_ ," Weaver's swarm buzzed, hummed, and chirped, the voice entirely demonic without Armsmaster's filters to dampen it down, " _stalking can be a misdemeanor or a felony depending on the situation. If you're going to do it, not sitting in a tree with binoculars in the middle of the day would be a good start, but it's smarter to just think of some other way to get your thrills. I suggest bird-watching, since you already have the equipment."_

"Sorry," Emma blurted out, "we were just _worried_ , Taylor has dropped out of school and there was talk of her doing drugs, but nobody's seen her in a while…" She let the insinuation trail off there. It was a passable attempt at seeming innocent, if clueless, but Shadow Stalker had been on the opposite side of such tall tales way too often to believe it would work. What was considered believable changed drastically when the person listening was a hero, and the one talking a potential criminal.

" _It's still a crime, even if you think you'll catch a criminal,"_ Weaver buzzed. " _But I might let you off… Emma Barnes."_

Emma blanched. "I didn't–"

" _You didn't have to,"_ Weaver's swarm said. The majority of the butterflies shifted, turning the 'face' of the blob to Sophia. " _We'll talk later."_

"You can't just _do_ that!" Sophia hissed, hoping she had just caught Weaver making a mistake, for once. "She didn't know!" Weaver had just clearly implied they knew each other, that was the sort of thing that got heroes in serious trouble, it was a massive breach of all their precious rules about security.

" _She's on record as being present at your initial probation hearing,"_ Weaver droned, somehow making a thousand bugs sound wry. " _Two months afterward, you explained to Armsmaster that she knows your civilian identity, in response to inquiries about a phone call he overheard, and what he considered lax security protocols. These things are logged, you know. Anyone in the Protectorate with a reason can access the files."_

Sophia seethed inwardly, even as she nodded numbly. Armsmaster, of course he wrote all of that down somewhere, of course Weaver could get at it. Everyone above her was incompetent except where it mattered least, their all-important bureaucracy. If they put this much effort toward catching _real_ criminals, Brockton Bay might not be a shithole. But no, here she was getting busted for stalking, of all things. If Dennis ever learned of this, he'd never let her live it down.

* * *

"I thought you were off today?" Dennis called out from his spot on the console as Sophia stalked in. There was an edge to his voice, and his position on the console made her think that he knew more than he let on about why she was here. If Weaver had come in on her off day and gone on a patrol by pure chance, Sophia was going to find a parahuman who could help her hunt down and _kill_ her phenomenally shitty luck.

"Freeze a curtain rod and sit on it," she growled, slinging her backpack on the couch. She was fully outfitted, because for some reason Weaver had let her and Emma off with a warning, and of course the veiled promise of punishments to come. She had time to go home, think about how terrible this would be, and _then_ make her way to the Rig.

"Ooh, like a witch's broom," Dennis said happily. "If I froze it, it would stay in the air… Thanks for the Halloween costume idea. Weaver and Armsmaster are waiting for you in her office."

Sophia trudged across the hall, even less enthusiastic about the upcoming confrontation now that Armsmaster was involved, and pushed open the door to Weaver's office.

There was a single chair in front of Weaver's desk, one that hadn't been there before. She was seated on the other side, looking for all the world like Principal Blackwell with a costume and an even bigger sense of self-importance, and Armsmaster was looming behind her.

She sat, mentally marshalling her defenses. She was helping her friend, she was worried for a civilian, she was keeping an eye on her unstable friend who was going through some things, she was acting to protect her school from a potential school shooter… If worst came to worst, she could imply she was checking on a potential trigger event and hope nobody looked into the event itself. This wasn't going to drag her down, not if she could talk her way out of it.

"Shadow Stalker," Weaver intoned. "This is a very complicated mess you've created."

That didn't give Sophia any hints into which of her excuses would work best, so she kept her mouth shut. She had seen dozens of perps incriminate themselves through talking too early; using that knowledge for herself was a bitter feeling, but she would do it anyway.

"Honestly," she continued, "did you really think I removed the surveillance cameras when I took this office? Or that I couldn't make my bugs act normal if I wanted them to?"

Sophia twitched, shifting into her breaker state for a split second before mastering herself and returning to normal. That was not what she had planned for. Weaver was supposed to bring up the Hebert thing, not the office incursion she had gotten away with.

"So there's that," Weaver continued. "You didn't _actually_ go the last step and invade my privacy. Less of a secrecy rape, more of a groping and subsequent hollow apology."

"Weaver," Armsmaster warned.

"Sorry, I'm a little worked up and I've been told It's not healthy to push my emotions into the swarm when dealing with interpersonal issues," Weaver said casually. "I'm trying to be more expressive. Anyway… That was bad."

Sophia shifted in her seat. She wasn't _nervous_ , she was just… apprehensive. Ready for a fight, even if there wasn't one to be had. She had been in tighter scrapes before. Though none that she couldn't shoot and phase her way out of.

"That was bad," Weaver repeated. "What you did next, though, was worse. Do you know why?"

Sophia stared blankly at her. She didn't know what Weaver wanted to hear.

But it seemed silence wasn't the answer Weaver wanted, either. "I'm going to need you to explain to me what you thought you were doing today," Weaver demanded.

"My friend was wondering what happened to a classmate of ours, and we went to go find out," Sophia said carefully. She knew Armsmaster had a lie detector in his helmet. "That's it."

"It wasn't at all related to breaking into Weaver's office?" Armsmaster demanded.

"No," Sophia said truthfully. "How could it be?"

"How could it be," Weaver repeated. She turned to look at Armsmaster. "Truth?"

"Truth," he confirmed.

"Well…" Weaver's butterflies, ever-present on her armor, were fidgeting, noticeably moving around more than normal. "That makes this even less clear-cut. I'm not sure what to do now."

"I'd suggest asking the obvious question," Armsmaster said dryly.

"I guess that's the thing to do," Weaver sighed. "Sophia. Do you know _my_ identity?"

Sophia stared at the marked facemask, at the yellow lenses obscuring any hint at the one behind them. "I have no idea who you are," she said bluntly.

"Truth," Armsmaster declared.

"Not that it'll stay that way for long, once you've had a chance to actually think about all of this," Weaver buzzed. "So… I guess it's best to head this off at the pass and unmask now."

Sophia watched as one white-gloved hand went to the back of the ever-present helmet and pulled it up, forward and over by the hanging bit at the back, first detaching it from the rest of the armor and then removing it…

Black hair spilled out, and a far too familiar face followed.

"You know," Taylor Hebert said dryly, the buzz underlying her voice fading away completely as the last few cicadas on her neck stopped moving, "I'm honestly at a loss as to how I'm supposed to handle this, according to the rulebook."

"The regulations weren't designed for this level of ridiculousness and prior incompetence," Armsmaster offered, filling the silence as Sophia's mind struggled to catch up to what her clearly delusional eyes were reporting.

"I _did_ come to the Protectorate hoping their uneven levels of oversight would work for me," Taylor mused. "And I _have_ spent weeks trying to get things up to code… Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise."

"What…" Sophia swallowed compulsively. "What is this?"

"An unfortunate collision of civilian and professional lives where they were never intended to meet," Armsmaster sighed. "Weaver, I'm going to take you off duty while I sort through this mess."

"I expected nothing less," Taylor agreed.

"Shadow Stalker, go... " Armsmaster hesitated, then crossed his arms. "Regulation says Master-Stranger screening. You should be out in a few hours, we only need preliminary levels of thoroughness. After that, you're confined to the Rig until I get through this. You may go now."

Sophia rose automatically, not even thinking about it. Not even thinking about the complete contrast between Taylor Hebert and Weaver.

It came to mind that she might be going to juvie when all was said and done, that she might as well earn the punishment while she could. That Taylor Hebert was a pushover, a doormat waiting to be stamped on.

Taylor slipped Weaver's mask back on, the cicadas on her throat the last thing to disappear behind the family-friendly exterior, and Shadow Stalker tensed.

"For what it's worth," Weaver said with the same buzz in her voice as always, "I didn't plan any of this. It just happened this way. But I'm not that bothered by the system fucking _you_ over, for once."

Shadow Stalker heeded the little voice in the back of her head, the _other_ one, and walked out without a word. She knew she had lost. Somehow.

It didn't feel like Taylor had _won_ , though. If Sophia was entirely honest with herself, it felt like she had done this to herself, and Weaver was just the one to notice it happening. Taylor, who was Weaver but _wasn't_ in every way, was just a bystander.

Or so it felt. Maybe some time to sit around and do absolutely nothing was what she needed. Maybe she _was_ under some Master effect, and her worldview was perfectly intact underneath.

She could only hope.

* * *

Sophia stumbled out of Weaver's office, a blank, dumbfounded look on her face. Armsmaster stood behind Weaver, his halberd at the ready.

She would have been worried about the implications of his position if she didn't know him. He was suspicious, but underneath it all… The halberd wasn't meant as a threat, he was just optimally prepared to use it if she went crazy. Just like he had been if Shadow Stalker had tried to attack or flee.

"Is she under any form of compulsion or suggestion?" Armsmaster asked.

"No," Weaver said simply, pushing any irritation at the accusation out to her bugs. She did rely on that particular facet of her abilities far too often, her therapist was right, but for right now she couldn't afford to mess up. She could work through the tangled mess of emotions this entire series of events elicited _later_ , at home. Her dad would listen, though that promised to be its own awkward conversation, given his temper and how she wasn't planning to pin Sophia and the others down now that she had them…

"You harbor no ill-will toward the Protectorate or Shadow Stalker specifically?" Armsmaster asked.

"None toward the Protectorate," Taylor answered. "Sophia… I truly don't know. Nothing I've ever let get in the way of doing my job."

Armsmaster relaxed; any normal person would never see it, but she had long since worked out how to put bugs on his armor in the right places to sense the movement on the interior.

"I thought not," he said more warmly, moving to stand in front of her desk. "You've impressed me with your dedication and efficiency. I don't believe it was all an act."

"But you're still going to do a full investigation of all this," Taylor sighed. "And I'm probably fired, or demoted, or worse."

"That depends on certain details," Armsmaster said. "Truthful answers now would get you a lot of goodwill when that investigation happens."

"Such as?" Taylor asked. This was, strictly speaking, not how things should happen. Armsmaster should be sending her to the same Master-Stranger screening Sophia was going to have, and then confining her until he could fully investigate what was happening. Not ask questions in a semi-informal setting. She had read all the regulations, multiple times. Having the right bugs set up to read and turn pages meant she always had a book handy at work.

"Sophia claimed she and her friend were checking on a classmate, meaning someone around their age," Armsmaster said. He looked down at the chair, then presumably thought better of testing a flimsy fold-out metal contraption against hundreds of pounds of tinkertech armor. "Your records… They're not clear. I'm getting redirected to a subset of identity protection forms, but I was there for your entry interview and you never mentioned anything about witness protection…"

"Smoke, mirrors, and a good lawyer," Taylor explained. "Hypothetically, if one was not yet eighteen, but had a personal objection to being placed in another social environment with other teenagers, one might seek loopholes to get into the Protectorate. A sufficiently clever lawyer might have, upon hearing one's problem, sought out and discovered such a loophole."

"And this situation is completely hypothetical, because confirming otherwise would force me to close the loophole?" Armsmaster asked.

"Hypothetically, yes, but so long as you don't look too hard you won't find it," Taylor agreed. "It really only works if nobody has reason to really delve into the paperwork afterward. So, if someone did hypothetically pull it off, they did so by acting enough like an adult that nobody ever questioned it. And if the hypothetical father was totally on-board with all of this so long as his daughter's life improved…"

"Then nobody except maybe the Youth guard would ever have a reason to care that the rules were bent," Armsmaster concluded for her. "Assuming said rule-bender doesn't get into any legal trouble before they're actually an adult."

"That was my plan regardless of this hypothetical," Taylor confirmed. "I mean, what could possibly happen? I was thorough about knowing all the rules, I was doing great in my training, everything was going well…"

"And then Piggot and I came up with the plan to give the young, motivated, rule-oriented new recruit some extra responsibility, to free up more valuable veteran heroes full-time, while also giving the Wards more oversight." Armsmaster sighed and put a hand to his helmet. "That was our fault."

"You say fault, but…" She shrugged. "Once you brought the idea to me, I didn't exactly refuse." She had jumped at it, in fact. Being a part of teenage drama and stuck at the bottom of the totem pole was horrible, but getting put in charge and, if there was any drama, being in a position to stop it? Once she had seen what her new responsibilities would be, and how it mostly amounted to a camp counselor for parahumans with some extra authority, she had agreed.

"And at the time, you had no idea that any of the Wards would have known your civilian identity," Armsmaster supplied. "Is that correct?"

"I thought I'd not know any of them," she said firmly. Direct statements were better for Armsmaster's lie detector. He had told her as much on their joint patrols. He was easy to work with, once she had figured out what drove him. Credit didn't matter to her, so once she settled into her partially PR-mandated style of combat, they went well together. She could play the support role.

"Why not?" Armsmaster pressed.

"Circumstance, statistics… optimism?" She suggested. "Everyone knows the Wards go to Arcadia, and the rumors about Shadow Stalker going to Winslow were never proven. There were only six or seven Wards, out of thousands of teenagers in the city, and the number of teenagers who know _me_ is almost as small. I thought I wouldn't know them, and I even made an effort to have them refrain from unmasking to me."

"When did you find out who Shadow Stalker was?" Armsmaster asked. Taylor had a feeling that this particular interview might find its way into the records as an official encounter if she approved once they were done.

"Two weeks in, when she walked into my office without her mask and complained about the console duty I assigned her after she flipped off a civilian in the middle of her patrol," Taylor promptly answered. _That_ had been… less of a shock than it should have been, really. After two weeks of trying to bring the Wards of Brockton Bay up to snuff when compared to the rest of the country, she had been given ample opportunity to notice the similarity in personalities and brutality. It was more of an unpleasant confirmation than a revelation. Not that she would tell Armsmaster so unless he asked. There was being truthful, and then there was digging herself a deeper hole for no reason.

"I do recall that incident report," Armsmaster confirmed. "And this knowledge didn't change how you interacted with Shadow Stalker going forward?"

"It did, in one way," Taylor freely admitted. "It gave me a lot more context to work with. I shuffled a few of the Ward training modules around to prioritize the adequate force, public image, and professional behavior courses. Other than that, I did my best to treat her as Shadow Stalker, no more and no less. But she was not… easy… to work with anyway. I guess it could look like I was trying to aggravate her, but I really wasn't. She just wasn't getting with the program like everyone else was."

"I'm glad to hear that," Armsmaster said. "Aside from this, you've been an exemplary member of the Protectorate, especially in your zeal for the lesser-appreciated aspects of the job."

"My power lets me multitask," she said wryly. "If I wanted to, I could be rereading every PRT manual in the building right now, while also talking to you. I'm not, of course, but it does make things go a lot faster."

"Be that as it may," Armsmaster said stiffly. Taylor thought she detected a hint of envy in how thoroughly he refused to acknowledge that little skill. "What was your perception of the events of yesterday and today?"

"Yesterday and today… I didn't see yesterday's events," she admitted. "Sophia broke into my secure file cabinet, but I only noticed when I went to get her file and saw another shoved into a place it wasn't supposed to be, and checked the footage." Her little bluff about her insects was totally true, but it hadn't applied there, whatever she might have implied. "Today…"

She shrugged. "I was home, catching up on my schooling." Part of her cover story for joining the all-adult Protectorate at age sixteen had included implying that she was homeschooled and slightly behind on earning the general education diploma. Also that she was applying for college in the fall; she had never implied she was anything more than a day over eighteen years old, after all. The latter implication might even end up being true, given the prodigious rate she was tearing through textbooks with her powers and absolutely no sabotage from fellow students.

"You had a day off, and Shadow Stalker had previously arranged to reschedule her duties for the day," Armsmaster supplied.

"Yes." Her dad had been at work, she had been at the kitchen table, alone in the house… "I was watching the neighborhood, of course. The lawns and roads, specifically. You can never be too careful." She was also watching inside peoples' houses, but that didn't need to go on the record.

"As this incident may well demonstrate," Armsmaster agreed.

"I noticed two people climbing in a tree, and I _definitely_ noticed when a ladybug I'd put on one of them felt Shadow Stalker phasing," Taylor recalled. "That has a distinct feel, the ground disappearing and being replaced by a thick, unique sort of gas with its own wind, so I knew it was her right away. From there, I continued to monitor her and her friend while working at the table. Once I was sure they were just there to invade my privacy, I formed a few swarm clones and confronted the civilian, and then Shadow Stalker. From there, I came to the Rig, went for her file to make sure I knew everything that was available to me, and found the misplaced file that led me to further evidence she was intruding on my privacy. Then I brought it all to you, and you know the rest."

"I do." He tilted his head slightly, pointing the little hidden camera directly at her. "For the record, what are your intentions regarding the fallout from these events? What would you like to see happen, and what do you expect to happen?"

"I really don't know," Taylor admitted. "I'm pushing off maybe two thirds of my emotions right now, and that makes it easier to think clearly… But it doesn't make any of this simple. I guess since it's all in the open, I'd want an investigation into my past in relation to Shadow Stalker, and her actions. I avoided going to interrogate Sophia's social worker or anything like that, because it would make me look like I was pursuing a vendetta… Somebody else can do that in my place, now. Whatever comes of that, comes."

She didn't care. It had only been a few months, but she didn't care. Getting this job, flinging herself headlong into adulthood, in a sense, though she had begun only pretending, learning to force her emotions out into her swarm to better impersonate someone who wasn't a moody teenager… Working with Sophia without giving herself away, even to Gallant, earning some method of hatred-infused respect from her… Seeing Emma so pathetic, caught up a tree spying on a past friend, cowering before a superhero who took the time to lecture her and suggest she change her ways…

Working as a hero. Taking pictures with fans, reading the discussion pages dedicated to her cape persona and smiling at all the misinformation about her powers. Forming friendships with Battery and Velocity and Armsmaster of all people, real friendships though it was early yet. Stopping crimes, doing it with the backing of a whole organization. Mending the bridge between herself and her father one late night spent talking at a time, the ice broken by her new job and how little she felt she had to keep from him now.

"I came here with the hope that avoiding more immature drama would make my life better," she finally said, composing her thoughts into something more or less coherent. "It did. Immeasurably. I like my job, I love being a hero, I enjoy helping the Wards. Less so disciplining them, but I can do it, and if I wasn't the one in charge, I think I'd worry about the person who was. After me, I mean, not my predecessor." She had the butterflies crowded on her mask shift to give the impression of a smile.

"So if it comes down to it?" She shook her head. "Whatever happens to Sophia and Emma, I'll abide by it so long as it's done by the book. I care more about keeping my position here, keeping what I've got. I'm done with them."

"If Sophia was cleared of any major wrongdoing and remained in the Wards?" Armsmaster asked.

"Then I'd keep trying to mold her into a hero who won't be a constant headache for her coworkers," Taylor replied. "But that doesn't seem likely to be my responsibility, now that our past is known."

Armsmaster reached up and tapped his helmet, then pulled it off with a mechanical hiss. "Done recording. Want to skip the official debriefing and use that footage?"

"Thought you'd never ask," she said, removing her own helmet in turn. "Yes."

"For what it's worth," he said, looking her in the eye, "I'm going to try and keep both you and Sophia right where you are. If you weren't where you are now, I'd push for her to suffer the consequences of her actions directly…"

"But if I'm willing to try and fix her, that's the more efficient option?" she asked with a wry smile. She didn't _feel_ much of anything; her bugs were taking the brunt of her feelings, as the frantic deathmatch occurring in one of her bulk bug terrariums could attest to.

"No, I think it would be better for both of you, regardless of efficiency," he said seriously. "You're moving on, moving past what she did… Maybe she can too. Or maybe not, but I'd rather keep you where you are. I'll try and push things that way."

"Well, the Protectorate's inconsistent oversight had to work for me one day, after helping screw me so thoroughly past," she mused. "Thanks."

"It's the least I can do for a coworker," he said, leaning over to shake her hand. "I'll keep it all hushed up under identity protection, but you're going to get a lot of questions once the investigation reaches a conclusion."

"I can handle that." She returned her helmet to its rightful place atop her head and resumed using her cicadas to augment her voice. "Weaver is the perfect, mature adult."

Her sarcasm was rewarded with the rare sight of Armsmaster smiling.

**Author's Note: This one-shot was inspired by a comment from Randommodder05 on Reddit, which reads as follows:**

' _ **I've always thought it would be a funny idea for Taylor to be able to fake being an adult (maybe just over 18-ish) due to her height.**_

_**Of course, she's the closest in age to the Wards, so she's put in charge of them, since clearly, she'd be down with the kids and know all about the facebooks and the instagrams.** _

_**Which means she learns that Shadow Stalker is Sophia Hess... by becoming her boss.'** _

**I figured this would be easier to see from an uninformed point of view at first, and since Sophia is the only other person directly mentioned in the prompt, she got to be the one. Keeping it within suspension of disbelief, on the other hand, was much less simple. Getting her in believably would have been a lot easier with an alt-power tailored to make it simple. (A low Stranger subrating to make people see her as she wants them to, for instance, maybe a power based around perception with comparable levels of Queen-multitasking. Or maybe just a 'Not-My-Problem Effect' she can imbue objects with, strategically applied to the ink from her pen when she writes certain things down in the paperwork…) But as it is, with the canon powerset, it's a combination of vagueness, semi-probable explanations, and leaving things up to the imagination**

**But in all of that, trying to make it believable, it ended up not being humorous at all. It ended up being a (hopefully) believable, moderate interpretation of Sophia, and a totally different evolution of Taylor that was molded by the constant need to behave professionally in an environment that expected nothing less of her, but then also rewarded her dedication. Of Sophia coming to respect and hate Weaver in a way that was totally unrelated to her potential combat prowess, and entirely based on her behavior in the 'office' setting, though it was mostly offscreen either way. There was no explosion of anger and homicidal rage from Sophia, no haughty victory speech from Taylor, it wasn't even a** _**planned** _ **thing on either side… This one-shot ended up being messy and surprisingly calm, laser-focused on Taylor, Sophia, and not much else. There weren't even any fights. I'm not sure what happened or how well it'll be received, and little of it was in the spirit of what the original prompt asked for.**

**So, I did what any sane author would do… I committed to the specific path this story wanted to go down, wrote it from start to finish in under 48 hours, and then went on to write the crack-ridiculous version too! That'd be next chapter.**

**Now, a bit more housekeeping. In case anyone is wondering, this collection of Worm one-shots will update irregularly, because it's mostly a dumping ground for any _Worm_ one-shot I might do in the future. I started jotting down inspirations for alt-powers and interesting stories using them, got up a small list of prompts I wanted to do eventually, and when I saw that list in its full glory, decided I'd better make a compilation, rather than spamming individual one-shots. These little stories will be written and posted approximately when I feel like it, no promises and no schedule. I also do ** _**not** _ **intend to extend or convert any of them into full stories in any capacity; my writing style does not lend itself to working that way. Any full Worm stories will begin life as full Worm stories, not here. (I have exactly one book-length Worm AU in the works, FYI, and again, there's no deadline on it so who knows when it'll be done. I never post anything until I've finished the story in question, so as to avoid ever abandoning anything halfway, so it might be a while).**

**So yeah. Read, enjoy, review if you'd like, maybe follow this collection if you want to be alerted when I put out something else. Don't demand continuations of any particular one-shot or spam me with prompts, please; the latter is acceptable in moderation, but I promise nothing when it comes to following up on suggestions. If you're a new fan here for _Worm_ , feel free to check out my profile, but this is currently the only _Worm_ thing I have written.**


	2. Young For Her Height

_**Humor AU: Young For Her Age** _

She swept into the room in a tornado of butterflies, bumblebees, and enforced cheerfulness. The three Wards lounging around the conference table never saw her coming.

"We're under attack!" Aegis screamed as butterflies swarmed him, covering his eyes and generally confusing him by doing absolutely nothing.

"Duck and cover!" Vista yelled, twisting space to throw empty pretzel bags at the bugs; funnels of non-Euclidean geometry followed each bag, twisting bugs in and then locking them away, for all the good it did. A hundred bugs fell, and a thousand more swarmed out from the walls.

"My one weakness, hordes of disposable minions!" Clockblocker exclaimed, screaming wildly as he froze handfuls of bees all around himself, then froze his costume.

The tornado subsided a moment after the three Wards realized the futility of their various defenses. Aegis was busy shooing butterflies off his mask, but Vista and Clockblocker were looking when the swarms all dropped to the ground.

"This has been a test of your emergency Minion-type Master Infiltration protocols," the white-suited figure who stood in the doorway, now liberally draped in motionless bugs, proclaimed. "The biggest problem I saw is that you don't have any of those. Sloppy. It's a good thing I'm here to pick up the slack now. And I'm _early!_ "

"The notification said ten thirty," Aegis said. "It's ten fifty."

" _My_ notification said eleven sharp," the white-suited figure remarked. "Sounds like someone got things mixed up, and since Piggot isn't here yet, it's not me. I'm early." She swung her arms out, and the myriad of bugs across the room all flowed back to her, giving her a second and third layer of living armor, and relieving the three Wards of their many-limbed attackers.

"Are you… a new Ward?" Vista sounded as if she was dreading the answer.

"Nope," the white-suited figure responded cheerily. "Full-on Protectorate member here. Full salary, no trust fund, consequences for my actions, the whole deal."

"You don't _act_ like a Protectorate hero," Vista grumped, retrieving her pretzel-bag-traps and unwinding the space around them. The bugs inside fluttered and buzzed back to their master in intermittent streams.

"Can you keep a secret?" The white-armored figure leaned in, pulled off her mask, revealing a surprisingly unamused look on a youthful face with a wide mouth, framed by black hair. "This is a compromise with PR," she said, her voice completely level and serious. "The more humor-focused I am, the more slack they cut me with my powers and how they look. Just play along, they want me to be in character at all times." She slipped the white mask back on and stepped back from the table. "Maybe I'll be able to relax once everyone is sure I'm not going to snap and go mental because of my evil, evil bugs!" A swarm of fuzzy bumblebees orbited her head in a lopsided ring to punctuate her declaration.

"Yeah, that might take a while," Clockblocker said, sounding dazed. Aegis and Vista didn't look much better; if mental whiplash was as harmful as the real thing, they'd all be on their way to the hospital.

"You look very… young." Aegis offered.

"I missed the Wards by a few months," she replied. "I'm going to be your boss because apparently Armsmaster is getting sued by the Youth Guard for being an older man with no social skills in charge of impressionable teenagers, and Piggot wants somebody naïve and innocent in the position until that farce is cleared up."

"I did wonder why he was building a lawyer-defenstrating attachment for his halberd," Kid Win remarked as he walked in, skirting around the living mass of bugs standing in front of the table. "I was worried Brandish had gone rogue." Gallant, Shadow Stalker, Browbeat, and finally Piggot herself followed, the latter brandishing her trademark scowl like a weapon of war.

"Sit down and shut up," Piggot grunted as she made her way to the front of the room. "Everyone listen up, I'm only saying this once, and I'm only saying it at all because some people like lawsuits far too much. Weaver is a new Protectorate member. Weaver is young, hip, and totally innocent as far as PR scandals go. Armsmaster is fending off a horde of lawyers that have collectively been classified as an A-class threat to the Protectorate. Therefore, Weaver is now the one stuck dealing with you, may god have mercy on her soul and sanity. Any complaints about this should go to Weaver, Miss Militia, any other hero in Brockton Bay, the lunch ladies in the cafeteria, the janitor, Thomas Calvert, and as a last resort…"

"You?" Gallant asked hopefully.

"Find a squirrel and ask it to get Mouse Protector for you," Piggot said spitefully. " _Then_ me, if that doesn't work. Shadow Stalker, if you kill Weaver, I'll have you shipped off to the next Behemoth fight, tied to Eidolon, and used as a distraction." Ignoring the total insanity of her threat, and the utter shock her tirade produced in everyone listening, Piggot thumped of the room and slammed the door.

"... Squirrels aren't mice…" Clockblocker was heard faintly muttering in the shocked silence. At the same time, Shadow Stalker was whispering "fighting Behemoth with Eidolon" in a small, awed voice. It wasn't actually all that silent, but compared to the constant whirlwind of bug attacks, overly enthusiastic new heroes, and disgruntled rants from Directors, two people muttering _felt_ like utter silence.

A loud clap broke the silence; Weaver weathered their startled glares without a care in the world. "Wards! Hello! I'm–"

"Chaos incarnate?" Vista asked.

"Close!" Weaver confirmed, nodded wildly. "That's what I'm aiming for, with a side of 'harmless and occasionally bumbling' to make it less terrifying. How am I doing?"

"I, for one, and terrified," Clockblocker deadpanned. "More bumbling."

"Duly noted!" Weaver exclaimed. Everyone else flinched. "Now, as Piggot said, I'm your new boss." Everyone flinched harder, except for Shadow Stalker, who had taken out her crossbow and was doing something to the bolts.

"Is this… temporary?" Aegis asked.

"Depends," Weaver said thoughtfully. "Anyone know if bloodsucking lawyers can get through power armor? If Armsmaster falls in battle in the courts, I might be here a while."

"New question," Vista said. "Are we allowed to go help him instead of staying here?"

"If you want to be treated like the preteen you really are, sure!" Weaver assured her. "Because if you go to be a witness, they might cross-examine you, and given reason he's being sued, that would mean making sure the entire jury saw you as a little girl he helped turn into a child soldier…"

"I'll stay here," Vista said sullenly.

"Thought you might," Weaver agreed. "Now, let's go around and introduce ourselves. I'm Weaver, and my powers include controlling every bug within a several-block radius, individually. At the same time. Right now, I have over three million eyes, legs, wings, and stingers within reach, and I consider that a low number."

There was a moment of horrified silence.

"Clockblocker," the clock-themed teen volunteered. "I stop things in time, and I am feeling severely outclassed. Also, I think I might be developing a deeply-rooted fear of insects."

"I'm Aegis," Aegis added, seemingly unwilling to let the unnerving silence return. "I can fly, and my body adapts to things. Blow my eardrums out, and my toes take up the slack."

"I'm sure that's very useful," Weaver said sagely. "Next!"

"Vista, I warp space." She demonstrated by putting a football field's distance between herself and the rest of the table, then shrinking it back down to normal. "I'm also the most experienced Ward on the team, so if you're thinking about having a deputy…"

"I might be in the market for a sidekick," Weaver suggested. "You'd need to rebrand, though. Can you do cute and innocent?"

"I'm Gallant," Gallant intervened, cutting off Vista's likely vulgar response. "I see emotions…" He trailed off and gave Weaver a look. "I generally don't talk about what I'm seeing, but if you need to confide in someone–"

"No implying I'm anything other than the cheerful one-dimensional paragon of virtue in front of you now," Weaver said, waving a finger. More threateningly, a few decidedly unpleasant-looking bugs skittered across the conference table, too fast to be identified. "Whatever you may see, keep it quiet. I got a bill of good mental health from the power testing therapist, and they know everything."

"Power testing doesn't have therapists," Browbeat said quietly. "I was there last week."

"Well, one of the scientists was worried when I started testing out my public persona in front of them, so they do now!" She tapped the forehead of her mask. "I'm going to try and get the Wards their own therapist soon, it's just throwing fuel on the 'convict Armsmaster' fire to not have one. You're child soldiers, you should get to talk about your feelings on occasion!"

"Isn't Armsmaster trying to convince the courts that we're not child soldiers?" Kid Win objected.

"Yes, but you totally are," Weaver said glibly. "It's fine, that's why I'm here!" She leaned forward to put her hands on the table–

A bolt from Shadow Stalker's crossbow passed through the space where Weaver's head had been a moment ago, embedding itself in the wall. The tranquilizer head had been removed, and the shaft sharpened to a makeshift point.

Everyone stared at Shadow Stalker, who was unremorsefully pointing her crossbow at Weaver.

"I want to fight Behemoth with Eidolon," she said simply, loading up another bolt.

"Child soldier," Weaver proclaimed, pointing dramatically at Shadow Stalker.

"Oh, god," Gallant groaned, folding forward to let his forehead rest on the table. Nobody paid him any attention.

* * *

Shadow Stalker and Weaver couldn't have been any more disparate a pair, walking through a run-down neighborhood near the docks. One was clad in white with a halo of riotous colors fluttering around her, and the other outfitted in black and alone. One skulked, sticking to the shadows whenever possible, and the other walked casually in the sunlight.

One was cheerfully speaking, and the other seethed with held-back anger.

"So, the thing you need to learn," the complete newcomer to the cape scene said to the seasoned former vigilante, "is… everything. I guess it's relearning, in that case, since you think you know most of it."

"I know how to be a hero," Shadow Stalker hissed.

"No, you totally don't, but that's fine!" Weaver waved to a pair of young men skulking in an alleyway, seemingly unbothered by their general aura of suspicious activity. One waved back. "We're going back to square one, and I'm going to teach you! It's all fresh in my mind from the training seminar, so I'm the perfect one to put you back on the training wheels."

Shadow Stalker raised her crossbow and aimed at Weaver's torso, but the only thing she had in it was a tranquilizer bolt, and she hadn't taken the time to turn it into something more satisfying. She began covertly looking around for sharp rocks to maybe tie to the end, but the only thing she could find was gravel and little bits of glass too small to do the job. Or somebody to beat up. Or a thug with a gun she could blame if Weaver turned up dead in a ditch…

There were surprisingly few people around; Weaver's patrol route took them through the heart of E88 territory, a privilege Shadow Stalker was intensely envious of, but the streets were empty. The buildings were open for business, those that had a business, but she had yet to see even a covert drug deal.

"The first thing we'll cover will be interacting with the public," Weaver nattered on. She wasn't even looking in Shadow Stalker's direction, staring vacantly up at the sky as she walked… somehow avoiding tripping on the curve despite not seeing it. "Shaking hands, taking pictures, not cursing out preteens with stammering problems… You know, just generally not being a bitch." A brief shadow fell over them, but when Shadow Stalker looked up, the sky was clear, save for a half-dozen flies zipping across the street in a V-formation.

There was a broken-off broom handle jutting out of a dumpster on Shadow Stalker's side of the street; she made a show of checking out the alleyway containing said dumpster and snapped off a long, jagged splinter. That would do nicely. She was _going_ to get that team-up; Piggot wouldn't have promised it unless she wanted Weaver to meet with an unfortunate accident.

"After that, how to behave in your civilian life to avoid tipping off the people around you to your status as a parahuman, because you would not _believe_ how bad most people are at that," Weaver continued. "I mean, I'm amazing, but Kid Win has gotten several worried emails from teachers about how absent-minded he's been in class, Vista's friends all call her 'little miss Ward' because of how she acts whenever the Wards come up in conversation, and Aegis tells me Dennis almost got caught freezing a bathroom stall door shut because the lock was broken."

Shadow Stalker popped the bolt out of her crossbow and snapped the tranquilizer head off.

"I mean, who knows what mistakes you're making," Weaver blathered on. Shadow Stalker wasn't listening to her in the slightest. "Pissing off the gangs at Winslow, maybe, or flaunting your fitness without an excuse for it… You run track, but that doesn't explain having the arms of a brawler. Maybe you bully some helpless kid in your free time, just because you feel like it. Your hero personality is edgy and violent and people know Shadow Stalker is supposed to go to Winslow, that's like drawing a line right to yourself for anyone you piss off in either identity…"

A fat, hairy spider dropped from the sky to land on Shadow stalker's hands just as she tried to use her powers to merge the splinter and the bolt shaft together. She couldn't turn back at the right time without getting a spider lodged inside her arm, and when the spider finally fell out of her outline, both splinter and bolt were ruined, stuck together at exactly the wrong angle in a way that was so brittle it immediately snapped.

Weaver continued talking as if nothing had happened. "So there's that, and by the way, talking like I am right now isn't something you do in public unless you're sure nobody's around, and then there's the proper level of violence to wield against different types of criminal…"

Her blathering was interrupted by a shriek from down the street. A man and a woman were running toward them, the latter holding a purse and the former chasing him, slowly gaining.

Shadow Stalker had never seen such a pathetic crime in her life. In about ten seconds, the lady was going to catch the would-be thief, and judging by the thickness of her arms, she would then either beat him into the ground or just manhandle him until he was sorry.

"Here's a perfect first crime to stop," Weaver suggested. "Go out there, take the purse back, and do it without hurting the guy. He's a nonviolent offender–"

It was a pathetic excuse for a crime, but it was an excuse to hurt someone, whatever Weaver was saying. Shadow Stalker surged forward, shifting to her Breaker state to pass through a stop sign in the way, and rapidly closed the distance between herself and the criminal, who was only now realizing that he was running toward trouble.

She snatched the purse out of his hands, wrenching it to break a few fingers in the process, and used her body weight to yank him to the ground. He hit hard and rolled to a stop, just in time to receive a kick to the gut from the lady who had been chasing him.

Weaver was somehow there in an instant, blocking the kick with her own foot. "Now, now, don't give him a chance to do something stupid like sue you for assault," she chided. "You wouldn't believe the cases some lawyers will take in this town. No sense of priority, none at all." She took the bag from Shadow Stalker without even looking and handed it back.

Shadow Stalker saw her chance and faded again, quickly leaving the scene while Weaver was tied up with the woman. She could break away, go patrol on her own, find something _real_ to stop…

But as she quickly ascended to the rooftops and began the _real_ hunt, she noticed something.

There were bugs _everywhere_. Phalanxes of beetles crawling along walls, strictly-ordered regiments of cockroaches patrolling alleyways, lone butterflies watching the skies, horseflies buzzing menacingly near anyone who so much as loitered… Spiders by the thousand were busily spinning webs to wrap around what Shadow Stalker thought was a wad of cash sitting abandoned on a roof. There were footprints near the cash, and a speckling of dead bugs, freshly squashed.

Weaver was stealing every single crime worth stopping, and she was handling them all simultaneously. Shadow Stalker saw red–

Then she saw black and cracked-riddled grey, as a chunk of concrete soared right by her and crashed down in the middle of the street she had left Weaver on. Rune, nobody else bothered to ruin roads as a method of transport, and she wasn't alone. Four figures, Shadow Stalker saw as she ran back to Weaver, hopping across rooftops, were dismounting rubble. One was Rune, but the others were definitely not.

"You're ruining our territory," Krieg announced, his voice booming, "and we will not stand for it. Your vermin torment upstanding citizens." Fenja and Menja flanked him, beginning to grow in tandem. Rune levitated her rubble, hefting it menacingly over her own head.

Shadow Stalker readied another tranquilizer bolt. She'd shoot Rune first; the idiot might get crushed by her own power, and _that_ would be worth any amount of punishment afterward.

Weaver stood in the middle of the street, bugs in a cloud around her. "Whatever you do," she yelled, "leave the Ward out of it!" A substantial portion of her swarm flew over to the rooftop, and by extension to Sophia, completely blowing her cover and ruining her clear shot on Rune. "Your fight is with me!"

The bugs descended on Rune, Krieg, Fenja and Menja, and Shadow Stalker _tried_ to descend on them too. Tried and failed, because there were bugs everywhere, getting in her eyes, blocking her path with their little air-displacing bodies and buzzing wings, swirling in her face.

She swiped at the fat, obnoxious butterflies blocking her view and got a clear look long enough to see Krieg flailing at himself, and the twins trying to smack Weaver into the pavement like the bug she was. Then the bugs were back in her face, and she was retreating to try and escape Weaver's interference.

By the time Shadow Stalker found another rooftop out of Weaver's range – two blocks was a deceptively large distance to travel with butterflies trying to go up one's nose – and doubled back, the fight was over.

Krieg was a rolling, moaning mass of ants. Fenja was back to normal, unconscious on the ground, and Menja had her car-sized hands held up in surrender. Rune was talking to Weaver, seemingly no worse for wear.

She had missed the _entire fight_.

"I told you," Weaver called up to her, "you're still in training! No fighting supervillains until we get through the other stuff!"

Shadow Stalker returned to plotting murder, now with one more reason than before. Maybe she could trick the Empire into helping her… they didn't _know_ she was black, they might be willing to cooperate. Though with the way Rune was meekly submitting to being handcuffed, she might have to look elsewhere for villainous assistance.

* * *

Gallant eyed the door. "It's barricaded?" he asked.

"Yes," Velocity confirmed. "I don't think this is a hostage situation, but that might change if you try to go in there."

"Any weapons?" he asked. He didn't want to force his way in, holdout negotiation lessons said that was the worst thing to do, but at the same time…

"She's partial to clubbing anybody who tries to get in, but no guns or obvious parahuman abilities," Velocity explained. He was standing in front of the door, blocking the way. "Any other questions?"

" _Why_ had Director Piggot barricaded herself into her office?" Gallant asked, at a loss. He needed to ask her a few pointed questions about Weaver, and how something was _obviously_ wrong with her emotions. The only people he'd ever seen switch between entirely different sets of emotions on a whim like she did were people with certain mental disorders, and even they had more of a lag time between personalities!

"She won't give me a straight answer," Velocity admitted. "I lower her down food from the window of the office above hers, and she slips orders under the door. You could try writing your request down and sending it with her lunch, but unless it's something she thinks is important, she'll just give you the new default response."

"And that is?" Gallant asked, wishing he had taken something for his headache before seeking out the Director. Weaver's emotions always gave him a headache, he had learned to deal with it, but the general insanity that had gripped the Brockton Bay Protectorate was making it worse.

"I said ask the squirrels," Velocity said dryly. "If it's code, nobody knows what it really means. If it's not… Alexandria called and said our priority as a branch was _not_ making any more messes until the thing with Armsmaster is cleared up, so we're not allowed to get her replaced."

"Well... " Leaving a note wouldn't be worth it; he wanted a conversation, an explanation, not a reminder that their Director had abdicated all responsibility to the nearest rodent. "Thanks for explaining."

"It was either explain or let you find out for yourself, and Dauntless still has a concussion from when I let him find out," Velocity elaborated. "She beans anyone who gets past the door with a fire extinguisher. Or, if you catch her during dialysis, with parts of the machine. We still don't know how she got it set up in there without anyone noticing."

Gallant wandered away from the Director's office, mentally going over the chain of command Piggot had given the Wards just a week ago. At the top of the list was Miss Militia, but she had taken Vista out to a shooting range in the countryside to test 'S-class deterrence measures' and give Vista a class on handgun safety. Armsmaster was still preparing his legal defense somewhere in Boston. Velocity was literally being run ragged to cover for them, and apparently keeping people safe from Piggot's wrath on the side. He now knew why Dauntless was in the hospital. Battery and Assault had taken personal leave for some reason; they had left just before Armsmaster's thing kicked off.

Not even Dragon had been able to help; the one time he'd managed to get through on her phone line, the other end of the call had sounded like a battle in progress, and she had assured him that she had no idea what the Brockton Bay Protectorate was doing with a new hero; her interest in them extended as far as Armsmaster. Then she had hung up.

Like it or not, the only adult hero he was able to reach but hadn't yet asked about Weaver was… Weaver herself. She was his only option, unless he wanted to start interrogating the janitors and cooks. Or Thomas Calvert, whoever that was. Some subcontractor, from what little Gallant knew, but one who was barely ever in the building.

Faced with a choice between seeking out a random nobody or asking Weaver herself, Gallant decided to face the firing squad of rapid-fire emotions and ask Weaver. He spent the entire walk to her office psyching himself up. She was hurting, or insane, and neither of those things were her fault. He could look her in the eye – or mask, as it were – for more than ten seconds without wincing. He just had to ignore the way her colors shuffled around and never quite matched up with how she was acting. Like assessing a bad car crash without looking too closely at the injuries of the drivers.

The door to Weaver's office was open, granting an unrestricted view of two massive, brightly-colored plastic beehives sitting on a desk, buzzing with activity. Weaver had a gloved hand inside each of the hives, digging deep for something with her back to him. Her mask was on, and her emotions were a relatively normal mix of annoyance and interest. Then they flashed to pure amusement for absolutely no reason, like someone had told a great joke… But nothing had changed.

Gallant's head throbbed as he cleared his throat. "Weaver?"

"Yes, Gallant?" she asked, not even looking over her shoulder at him. "If you want to taste-test my new merchandise, you're going to have to wait a little longer. These fake beehives skimped on the inside texture, and sanding them by hand just isn't working very well."

"I actually had a few questions for you, once you have a moment free," he said awkwardly. This was going well, by any reasonable definition of the word. She wasn't flitting around intimidating and amusing everyone by equal margins, or dealing out assignments like a madwoman, or flinging hornets at his face. Still, he didn't _feel_ good about what was to come. Weaver didn't make sense, and that put him on edge.

"Are they power-related questions?" Weaver asked. She withdrew her left arm, covered in gunk and clutching a bit of sandpaper in her fist, and used it to steady the beehive her right arm was still ensconced in. A small swarm of bees landed on her left arm and began eating the gunk while she worked.

"Yes," he said, throwing caution to the wind. "Could you… not? Do that?"

"You'll have to be more specific," she huffed.

"Your emotions jumping around like a toddler at Disneyland before it closed down," he said. "Is it something you can control? Because I really need to have a straight conversation with you, and Clockblocker said you were putting on a show for PR, but it doesn't look like that from my point of view."

Weaver removed her other arm from the beehive and turned around. She pulled her mask off, and all the bugs in the room landed and fell still. Her emotions settled to a contradictory mixture of patience and anxiety, though he didn't know why the latter was involved. "If that's what you need," she said neutrally. "What's the problem?"

"I want to know what's going on."

"Think you can handle it?" she asked seriously. "I can drop all of it on you right now, and you'll understand. You might wish you didn't, though."

"Hit me." He'd rather be done puzzling over her.

"I'm the boss of one of the people who caused my Trigger Event, I'm constantly aware of everything happening within two blocks so long as there's a bug there, my powers let me not feel my own emotions, I'm on a leash with my powers that means the more ridiculous I act the fewer restrictions they put on me, and when I went to Armsmaster for advice he gave me an old pocketwatch from the confiscated Tinkertech vault and told me it was something Leet made that would let me self-hypnotize myself into being able to act like a fun-loving, well-meaning lunatic whenever my mask is on," Weaver said, never even stopping for air. "I think that's most of it."

"I… Oh." That… _would_ explain things. Quite well, actually. But she was right, he would rather not have known. "Anything _else_ I shouldn't know?"

"I'm sixteen, but they let me into the Protectorate because I'm tall and nobody actually asked about my age," she added, picking up her mask from where she had set it on the desk. "And I think I like myself better with the mask on. Don't tell the Youth Guard." She slipped the mask on.

Then she turned to him. "Want to help me make my beehives?" Despite the invitation, the low buzzing in the background was nothing if not menacing.

Gallant fled the room. He didn't stop running until he was out of the Rig, over the bridge, and under a tree planted in the median of the road. He slumped down there, his back to its trunk.

"I didn't need to know," he moaned. He had been happier thinking Weaver was just a crazy woman in charge of the Wards. He had nobody to turn to, no higher authority to ask for help...

He looked up. A fuzzy brown creature with beady black eyes looked down at him.

"Help me, Mouse Protector," he requested, knowing even as he spoke that nothing would happen. Some random independent hero who operated in a different city wasn't going to show up and tell him what to do, not even if she _could_ see him through a squirrel–

There was a flash of light in the middle of the street. A costumed figure appeared in the light, her hood's floppy ears silhouetted for a brief moment.

"You called?" she asked eagerly. Her emotions were a turbulent blend, switching in and out in a way that was similar and yet utterly different to Weaver-

His Thinker headache objected quite vigorously to yet another ridiculous overload of information, and he fainted on the spot.

* * *

_Bonus Scene:_

Armsmaster crouched behind the judge's desk, clutching the ceremonial gavel in one hand, and his sparking, half-destroyed halberd in the other. Dragon, in one of her more humanoid suits, crouched beside him. The minigun on her shoulder was out of charge, and from the way she was frantically hunting for a wall outlet, everything else in her suit was too. They had gotten to her interior reactors early, catching her off-guard with their judicious use of staplers and whatever else they could find lying around…

"Skies?" she asked him, her melodious voice sorely strained. "Could go straight up."

"Structural integrity might hold up, but there are innocents in the holding cells, we'd be dooming them," he objected. They were cut off from the internet, part of the courthouse's more effective security measures, but he had downloaded the building's blueprints a week ago. Half the place would collapse if two suits of power armor smashed a path up through the center of it. Shoddy design, really.

"Didn't know about them," Dragon admitted. "Not used to going into these things blind."

"It was an ambush, going in blind is normal," he reassured her. A briefcase flew over where they were crouching and smashed against the wall, legal papers spilling out. He took the chance and stood, firing at the shambling pack of legal hounds. They returned fire, a few wielding guns taken from the security personnel, and he was forced to duck again.

"We couldn't have known this would happen," he asserted. He'd come prepared for a war of words, not a war against an entire horde of lawyers under some variant of a Master effect.

"We-" Dragon's head tilted. "Hang on. Incoming call? It's… Gallant. I'm picking it up."

"We're in the middle of a fight for our lives!" he complained. "This is more important!" Not to mention he had no idea how she was even _getting_ a call right now.

"No, Gallant, I don't know anything about Weaver, and I'm not in any position to check right now," Dragon said. There was a loud yell from somewhere behind them, and she took a moment to detach the last of her containment foam grenades and toss it over her shoulder. The yelling took on a far more frustrated tone. "I'm not cleared to access personnel files, anyway. Armsmaster is the only hero I know about on a personal level. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Whatever reply Gallant gave, Armsmaster missed it, as he was too busy watching a vent near the ceiling shift, the metal covering falling off and clattering on the floor. A pale hand reached out–

Dragon hung up and looked up at the vent. "This is getting ridiculous," she said. "Colin, take us out for a minute?"

"It's just getting good," he complained. This was his best version yet, it was so _realistic_.

"Please?" she asked. "Don't make me disconnect."

"Five minute break," he conceded, thumbing the necessary code into his gauntlet. The bloodied, besieged courthouse faded away from his visor, and his armor's systems all popped back up to one hundred percent functionality. He popped his helmet off and stepped down from the omnidirectional treadmill, blinking rapidly to accustom himself to the on-loan workshop the Boston Protectorate had provided.

Dragon's image popped onto one of the screens on the other side of the workshop; she looked disheveled, much like he felt. "I'm amazed by the way you set this up," she said, "and it's very impressive…"

"But?" he prompted. Maybe she was noticing the slight lag in the AI tactical protocols, or maybe she had a critique on the scenario itself. He was guessing the former; she had always been very observant when it came to his attempts at AI of any variety.

"But your lawsuit has its opening arguments in two days and you're spending your time perfecting a simulation where you fight a horde of lawyer zombies in the exact same courthouse you're scheduled to have your hearing at," Dragon said. "That's one of the warning signs of a school shooter, Colin. Simulating the slaughter in a similar environment."

"I'm just trying to get my finely honed battle instincts to recognize them as threats," he objected. "So I can win the war of words when it comes to that." He was _proud_ of his simulation, it was realistic enough that with his armor taken over by the program, he almost believed it. It was going to revolutionize training programs across the Protectorate once he got the kinks ironed out.

One such kink presented itself to him, and he frowned. "You got a call inside the simulated environment," he recalled. "Were you wearing the headset I sent over, or did you end up making a framework like I suggested?"

"Framework," Dragon replied, "but now that I think about it… I didn't give it phone compatibility."

"That's strange." He pulled his helmet back on and pulled up the program interface. It was still running, still latched onto his suit's computer, still hooked into a number of outside sources…"

"Colin," Dragon said. "The Dragonslayers just set down in Boston, outside the courthouse." Her voice was laden with confusion and disbelief. "Your courthouse. They're all in the suits they stole from me… What does your program _do_ when you tell it to apply itself to an armor system?" The visual on her screen cut off, leaving a bouncing Protectorate logo. "What… When did you make it into a virus!"

"I told you, it's self-installing," he objected.

"You sent me a virus and I opened it!" Dragon yelled frantically. "I gave it highest-level access! Administrative permissions!"

"Why did you do that?" he demanded. "It just needed to go on the suit you built for it, not your entire network!" Dragon was a careful programmer, there was absolutely no reason for her to do something so reckless.

"I wasn't sure if it would work right if I didn't give it full permissions, my systems are complicated," Dragon explained. "But that's not important, look!" A feed popped up on the screen, a live news report.

On it, the Dragonslayers were stomping around outside the courthouse, overturning parked cars and moving in a very stilted fashion. None of the three suits were flying, and one was doing its best to hop around on one leg, despite the other being perfectly fine. Some of Boston's local heroes were starting to knock them around, but they were barely responding.

"I think there's a spatial locating glitch in your program," Dragon observed as they watched the Dragonslayers bumble around on live television. "Did it fly them there?"

"The scenario starts out with an alert and a news briefing cutscene in the original version, followed by a spatial readjustment that I might have cut because it would require being at the actual scene of the scenario," Armsmaster recalled, his mind racing as he traced the potential ramifications of that particular mistake. Coding wasn't his specialty, he was more prone to mistakes when doing it than when working with physical materials, and he hadn't checked or accounted for his program getting access to anything but his own systems and an air-gapped control platform on Dragon's side of things…

"They're locked down according to the simulation, and they're seeing a horde of lawyer zombies that aren't there," Dragon reported. "They had a backdoor into my system, somewhere, and your program followed it to them and took over the suits because that's what it does… Colin, I could kiss you right now."

"I could ditch the trial and fly to Toronto," Colin quickly offered. "The courthouse is going to need repairs, so I've got some time..."

"Pick up some of Bonesaw's confiscated wetwork tools from the Ohio Protectorate vaults on the way and you've got a deal," Dragon offered.

Colin was already unhooking his armor from the treadmill, not even bothering to question her request. This would delay the trial, but Brockton Bay could do without him for a while longer.

 _**Author's Note** _ **: This was so much fun to write. It was also so** _**easy** _ **to write; throwing out all suspension of disbelief to be as ridiculous as I wanted was incredibly freeing. It's a little worrying, as I can't really tell whether the quality is consistent (the first scene feels like my best work, for the record, I was most 'in the zone' for that part), but… Meh. It was fun to do.**

**Next up, once I finish them, we'll have a few different mini-plots centered around alt-powers for Taylor. One's time-related and super overpowered, and the other is a coordination power so weak it doesn't even work on Parahumans. Both are interesting. We'll see which I finish first.**


	3. All is Clay

_**Author's Note** _ **: Well, typical of this collection, this next chapter is** _**neither** _ **of the prompts I mentioned at the end of last chapter. They're coming, though. Sooner or later.**

_**Alt-Power AU: All is Clay** _

Winslow high was far less intimidating at night. The halls were empty, the rooms were locked, the doors all closed. No bells rang over the intercoms, no crowds pushed and shoved their way through the halls. No tormentors lurked in unseen corners, or walked brazenly.

Taylor thought she could like the school, even, if she only had to come at night, when there was nobody there to ruin the silence and the emptiness. The darkness covered many of the building's flaws, but the biggest flaw was entirely gone from its decrepit halls.

It was cynical, but she felt she had the right to be cynical. Tonight, and only tonight, she was letting herself do what she wanted. Not what was smart or safe or _right_ , just… what she wanted.

She walked with her head held high, confident that there were no cameras or other recording devices to speak of. Oh, Winslow _had_ them, but if the various gangs agreed on one thing, it was that they didn't want to be recorded going about their days. No security camera, no matter how well-hidden, went more than two hours between installation and defacement. Black paint on lenses, moving posters to cover them, or just breaking them out of their mounts… Blackwell had long since given up on replacing them. All of which fit Taylor's purposes.

She turned a corner, and as she walked she held her left hand out to graze the hard brick wall. It felt like clay, living clay reflecting her heartbeat. She clenched her fingers together, and the brick and mortar squished.

When she pulled away from the wall, she dragged a strand of brickery behind her like gum, stretching and thinning. Three steps, and she let go, but the brick remained, stretched, impossible, molded. Still brick, just… not. A shoulder-height tendril of solid brick stretched out into the hall, sharp at the edge and, she knew from her little experimentation, speckled with little barbs, fractal spurs jutting out from every flat surface. Like a cactus.

As she made her way into the depths of the school, she dragged more impossible gouges in the walls and doors. Doorknobs squished and smeared across doors, windows gained holes like someone had melted the glass and shaped the molten results into clever shapes. Posters were pushed into the depths of walls.

All done as she walked; she was taking stupid risks on this night, but only stupid in concept, not execution. She would be in and out of Winslow in less than ten minutes, and there was no chance the prickly, random barbs her works left behind would leave anything as identifiable as fingerprints.

She found herself on the end of the hall she had come for. The hall with her locker, though it was in the middle and she was on the end, fifty lockers away from her own.

It would be too suspicious to trash _just_ her locker, of course. The entire row would have to go. _That_ was what she had come for.

She paused for a moment, contemplating the blank canvas laid out in front of her in dull metal and bad memories. Terrible memories, not made better in the slightest by getting her powers… Was it an hour into her torment? Two? Long enough.

She was glad she hadn't managed to make any real impact on the locker before losing consciousness _now_ , of course, but back then she would have traded anonymity for rescue in a heartbeat. Her power hadn't provided.

Now, though? Now she punched, her hand clenched and her teeth gritted, and sunk her fist into a locker down to the shoulder. She reached around, feeling clay in all directions, and sunk her other arm.

Spread, grip a handful of material, work it out into the open… She had never done pottery, but this had to be what it felt like, just on a larger scale. Everything was like clay, hard but pliable with a bit of force. And not like clay; when she hit something, it spiked out, growing a bit from the force, but that wasn't what she wanted here.

Here, she wanted to sculpt, to destroy and create with purpose. There were personal items inside a lot of the lockers around hers, things she could smear and drag out to add color. The personal effects of people who didn't care for her, people who could stand to sacrifice for her sake for once. They didn't give up their easy, comfortable daily lives to help someone being bullied, so it was their fault she was taking something else now.

Pencils made streaks of yellow-painted wood across the warped, twisted scene. Books smeared, compressed, rolled into balls and stuck to the rest, bristled menacingly. The lockers themselves provided raw material, raw mass for her to shape. The parts she pulled from furthest away were warping the further she brought them, stretching and turning a menacing black, but that worked perfectly with her vision. Everything was spiked and rough to the touch, and it looked like something out of a horror movie…

It was not perfect, but it was good. A hideous thing that would draw the eye, ugly and brutal, spikes framing a monstrous mouth she had shaped to hold shadows unless someone pointed a light directly inside. A poor facsimile of a maw, a representation of fear and terror made manifest.

It was half art and half her power, and it would cause an uproar. Impossible to fix, impossible to disassemble, a mass of sharp spikes and tripping hazards nestled in the crook of the wall like a malignant parasite _pretending_ to be a row of lockers. Ugly, mesmerizing…

She leaned forward and pressed a single finger into one of the spikes, leaving it there. Her heartbeat pulsed, and tiny little barbs began bubbling up to the surface of the metal, beating in time.

As best she could tell, any sort of force she exerted on her material translated to it spreading, spiking out, reaching to form something akin to the arm of a snowflake, nestled fractally within itself. These small spikes, the ones that came with anything she created… They were formed because of her pulse, the miniscule force her blood exerted from under her skin on anything she touched.

It was good that she could decide not to affect something, that she had to be in the right mindset to create, to _warp_. Else she'd never be able to hide herself or even wear clothing.

She took her finger off the spike once it had bristled to her liking, then turned on her heel and walked away. This… statement… would lead to suspicion, it would cast doubt on her if she wanted to try and be a hero. Which she still did, even though she was going to take it slow. Maybe she'd get slapped with a fine for destruction of property if they ever figured out who did it.

She still considered this a night well spent. Winslow's budget would suffer, Blackwell would actually have to get off her ass and do something for a change. Classes wouldn't be canceled, she had left the classrooms untouched save for some of the doors, but everything would be hindered and awkward. The Protectorate would maybe be called in.

All sorts of eyes would be on Winslow and her particular group of lockers. On those nearby, those who might be connected to the incident. She didn't think anything would come of it, but that wasn't the point. The point was to make them _look_.

Because if there was anything she was growing to hate more than the Trio, it was being trapped and nobody noticing. Nobody caring.

* * *

The commotion at Winslow, at least the parts of it that Taylor got to see, was everything she had expected and more. They had roped the whole hallway off, which just ensured half the school found reason to be in the forbidden area, and pictures of her artwork were already gaining traction on PHO. A few users there had even thought to draw the line between rumors of a girl shoved into a locker and her art, and better yet, the line they were drawing was 'vigilante offended by the injustice', not 'victim acting out.' She doubted things would continue to go that well for long, but it was a promising start.

Said promising start took a kick to the face that very night, as trouble came from a direction she hadn't expected.

She didn't practice her powers at home, for obvious reasons. Her usual spot, for all of three days before trashing Winslow, had been a larger boat in the boat graveyard. The graveyard was notorious for being a testing ground half the city's new capes ended up using, but that was because nobody had a reason to be out there, and there was no property to damage. It was perfect for her, despite its reputation, and she had been careful to only practice inside the larger ships, not out in plain sight.

Nobody had seen her; she had been fairly confident of it. But now, looking down from the deck, through a power-created knothole, she knew she was either extremely unlucky, or somehow attracting attention.

Not from the PRT or the gangs; the two figures in the shadowy hold weren't uniformed or obviously gang-affiliated. A morbidly obese man in a ludicrously large sweatshirt was sitting off to the side, watching a teenage girl in a green hood wandering the hold, the way a parent might watch a young child.

The girl, Taylor saw as she observed, was putting her hands on everything. The floor, the walls, the old metal scaffolding that used to keep crates in place for one reason or another. What was more, her hands were going to lumps, imperfections, breaks… Subtle disfigurements.

Places Taylor had damaged, and then practiced smoothing back with her power. It was hard to fix anything she did, but she could do it, more or less. Not well enough for this strange girl to be fooled, though. There was a distant air to her, something not quite right, but she found them like she was being drawn to them.

The man watched her for a while, patiently waiting for her to finish her inspection. When she finally sat down in the center of the cabin, he rose to go to her side. "Elle, do you want to go back now?" he asked.

"No," the girl said after a full minute's pause. "It's here."

"I must admit, I don't see anything different about this place," the man said kindly. "Maybe you could show me?"

"It's… thinner here." The girl's hands traced nonsensical patterns on the metal hold floor.

"Well, it's enough to get your attention like little else," he agreed.

There was movement in the depths of the hold. Taylor saw a marble pillar, of all things, crumbling out of the floor of the hold like it was rising from the depths of the earth, though she knew there was nothing below them but water and the bottom of the bay. There were carvings on the pillar, nonsensical designs she couldn't make out.

That was enough to tell her who these two were, though only because she had done her research once she knew she had powers. There was only one parahuman in the bay who could make architecture out of nothing, and that was one of Faultline's Crew, Labyrinth. Little was known of her except that…

Taylor had to think about it for a moment; she hadn't cared that much about researching Faultline's Crew, since they didn't take jobs in the Bay. She _thought_ Labyrinth might have been kidnapped at some point, but it wasn't really a kidnapping… A mental hospital. That was it. She'd been taken from an asylum for parahumans, and there was some debate on whether she _should_ be returned, given the other dirt Faultline's crew had unearthed on that job. That, and Labyrinth didn't seem bothered by living with a group of mercenaries nowadays, as far as anyone could tell.

Or maybe that last part was her own observation, here and now. The big man would be Gregor the Snail, if she assumed he was a parahuman too. Out here in the middle of the night, apparently having followed Labyrinth's directions, given he didn't know why they were there.

The marble pillars began sprouting in other places, too. Gregor looked around, then put a hand on Labyrinth's shoulder. "If you want to come back another time, we should not mark this place now," he said calmly.

Labyrinth brushed his hand off her shoulder. The big man looked down at his hand, then back at her, his movement so exaggerated Taylor had no trouble making it out in the shadowy darkness. "You are having a very good night," he said softly.

"It's thinner here," Labyrinth repeated absently. "Thinner…"

Taylor pulled back from her hole and began to pull the wood back into place, clenching her hands around the ragged edges to stop the wooden clay from spiking out like it would if not blocked. She heard a gasp from below, a low noise that was followed by Gregor asking what was wrong.

She cut and run, following her path out of the boat graveyard with practiced ease; whatever was happening here, she wanted no part of it. She would find another place to practice.

* * *

"I saw some pictures of the vandalism at Winslow," her father announced. He was making something in the kitchen, something that smelled of pepper.

Taylor tossed her backpack on the couch, fighting to hold back the apprehension that flooded her. "Really?" she called out. "Was it as weird as I said?"

"Lou accused the guy who showed us of taking pictures from a horror movie, and half of us believed him until somebody else pulled up the news report on their phone, so yeah," he replied. "Like the entire set of lockers decided to turn into an impressionist painting of the gates of hell. I can't believe Winslow is still open this week."

"If you want to take me out of school, feel free," Taylor volunteered. Her artwork had the trio on edge, so much so that they'd ignored her for the last two days, but she would happily skip class for a legitimate reason.

"If that thing starts making weird noises, you have my permission to leave immediately," he shot back. "How are your classes going?"

"I've mostly caught up," she said shortly. He didn't suspect it had been her; she wasn't surprised, but she was still glad.

"Any… any trouble?" he asked. Something hit a frying pan and sizzled fitfully.

"No," she said truthfully. She took her backpack and went upstairs, doing the dozen little things to unpack her things and check for nasty surprises hidden in her bag. It wouldn't be the first time she's had a good day only to come home and find an old roach trap at the bottom of her bag, or something equally disgusting. Today her bag was clean, but she couldn't count on that always being the case.

The front door opened and closed downstairs, followed by the distant creak of the front step. Taylor frowned to herself; she didn't know why her father would be abandoning his cooking to go outside.

Maybe it was her vandalism and close call at the ship graveyard the other night coloring her perception, but she was nervous. She headed back downstairs, poised to flip the mental switch that kept her powers from activating, ready to… something.

She hadn't really figured out any effective combat methods with her powers yet. If she punched a wall she could probably impale someone on the other side with a dozen spikes of brick or plastic siding, but that was decidedly lethal _and_ situational at best.

She approached one of the windows in the living room and twitched the curtains aside, making a gap large enough to see through.

The reason her father had left the house was immediately apparent; a familiar duo of supposed strangers was struggling in front of their driveway, an obese man holding back a teenager from coming closer. Gregor and Labyrinth, there out of costume no less. Gregor had a few strange protrusions on his face, though they looked like some sort of disease from where Taylor was standing, not something obviously cape-like.

Her father was a few steps away from them, holding a baseball bat Taylor could have sworn was in the basement.

The basement. She winced. She had done a few little things down there this morning, mostly to work off some nervous stress and reassure herself that her powers weren't going to come on at some unfortunate moment because she hadn't used them enough lately. She'd played with the cement flooring, sculpting it into fractal valleys and ravines, and near the end she'd pulled a glob of the floor halfway across the room, where it had taken on a decidedly white, stoney color of its own accord.

Ten minutes of messing around, and another ten of putting it all back in order like smoothing a clay sculpture back into a ball. Somehow, that was enough to have Labyrinth all but dragging Gregor to her front door in broad daylight.

Taylor considered letting her father handle it, but the fact of the matter was that he was a guy with a baseball bat dealing with two parahuman mercenaries. He might need her help if they got ugly… And they were here because of her.

There wasn't anything out there for her to work with, though. Except the car, and the pavement…

She kicked her shoes off, pulled off her socks, and opened the front door, going out barefoot. If worse came to worst, her power worked with any bare skin; she could maybe kick a nasty set of spikes at them at a moment's notice.

The step creaked as she stepped on it, drawing the attention of her father and the mercenaries. "Dad, what's going on?" she asked as innocently as she could manage.

"That's what I was trying to find out," her father said coldly. "Explain to me again why you were chasing a teenage girl in front of our house?" he asked Gregor. The bat hung loosely from his hand, adding what _would_ have been a credible threat to his words if Taylor didn't know what she knew.

"There," Elle said quietly, pointing somewhere to the left and down of Taylor. Down toward the basement.

"Elle has trouble sometimes with boundaries," Gregor explained in a voice that made it very hard to distrust him, reasonable and apologetic. "We were out for a walk, and she decided that she wanted to go into your house. I didn't want her to startle anyone, that is the way accidents happen. I suppose it might have looked suspicious."

"That's a nice story," her father said, "but you wouldn't happen to have proof of any kind?"

"I do, as a matter of fact," Gregor assured him, one hand on Labyrinth's shoulder while dug around in the front pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a wallet, then deftly flipped it. "Licensed caretaker," he explained, tapping an ID of some sort in the translucent sleeve of the wallet. "If you want to call my employer, I can give her your number."

"I'd like that, yes," was her father's response. He believed; she could tell. Not that he shouldn't; she was pretty sure Gregor _was_ Labyrinth's caretaker, whether or not that was technically legal since he was nominally a wanted criminal. It wasn't an abduction in progress or any of the things her father would have been worried about, anyway. Not really. Sort of.

Gregor passed Danny a pair of cards. "One for your daughter, too," he said. "My employer is always looking for those who can help care for Elle, and she pays well. Elle doesn't give many indications of what she wants, even on good days, and your house was interesting enough to cause all of this…" He shrugged his broad shoulders. "If you have reason to think she might like you, drop by. Otherwise, I'm sorry for the inconvenience. It's a bad habit to disturb people in their homes, and I'm truly sorry for that."

"Well, that's… generous?" Danny shook his head. "Have a good day."

"And you," Gregor said with a wide smile that did unfortunate things to the crescent growth on his cheek. He led Elle away with gentle tugs on her sleeve and murmured words. She looked back no less than four times before they were a dozen steps away.

Taylor retreated into the house, feeling like she had just been in a fight. Her toes scrunched on the carpet, which abruptly felt like clay, and she had to smooth it out with her heel before her father closed the door.

"That," he said faintly after he had clicked the lock and drawn the curtains closed, "was Gregor the Snail."

"Really?" Taylor asked.

"Yes, really," he replied, turning to look at her. "Do _you_ know what he meant with all that double talk about hiring us? Because I've been on the receiving end of bribes and threats before, and that wasn't either."

"Why would I know?" Taylor asked nervously.

"Because something in this house got his attention, and I know I haven't been doing anything different lately," her father said firmly. "Taylor, this, the lockers…" He let the question hang, unasked.

Taylor held no illusions as to whether she could bluff her way out of this. "I _may_ have gotten into sculpting recently," she allowed.

Danny collapsed onto the couch. "Sculpting…" he trailed off.

Taylor sat down next to him and kicked her heel into the ground. Spikes of carpet and wooden flooring shot out a good two feet past her toes, blatantly defying common sense.

"That's something," he said softly. "And Faultline's Crew came to our home because of your… sculpting?"

"Something about it attracts Labyrinth like a magnet does another magnet," She admitted. "They found my practice spot without me even being there, and I was doing stuff in the basement this morning."

"Capes don't usually find each other in civilian identities," Danny mused. "I've heard it's against some sort of rule. So I would like to think they didn't mean to be here…"

"But Labyrinth might not care about that," Taylor concluded. "So… yeah. Are we going to go... check it out?"

Danny looked down at the card he had been given. "Well, if she can find you anywhere... We don't have much to lose by seeing what they want... with proper precautions."

* * *

The Palanquin was something of an urban legend in Brockton Bay, even though it was definitely real and open every night of the week. Not just anyone got in, and those who did, at least among the high schoolers of Winslow, liked to talk it up. Except the Empire kids, of course; they didn't like Case 53s, and the Palanquin's biggest claim to fame was Newter and his non-addictive hallucinatory bodily fluids… Which Taylor thought was the the grossest claim to fame possible, though that was beside the point.

The point being that she'd heard plenty about the Palanquin before getting her own standing invitation, and actually seeing it put none of those rumors to rest. It was an expansive building in a seedy part of town, sporting no obvious signs or decorations. A line waited in front of the door, and the bouncer wasn't letting anyone in.

"Around the back is the way this usually works," Danny whispered to her as they walked by the back of the line and circled around the building. He had his business card in one hand, and she hers. He fished two cheap domino masks out of his pocket once they were in the alley, handing one to her.

"They don't know which of us is their sculptor," he had said back at the house, "and we don't have to tell them until we know what's what." Thus, both of them posing as capes.

There was another bouncer at the back door, this one even more intimidating than the one out front. Danny flashed his card with all the confidence in the world. "We have a standing invitation to discuss employment," he said smoothly.

"Don't let the girl drink," the bouncer grunted, moving aside to let them through the door. "Go to the second floor, ask for whoever gave you the card."

"I thought this was a haven of villainy," Taylor muttered as they made their way up the stairs. Not that she had wanted to drink here, but it seemed strange that they'd be worried about it.

"Being mercenaries and facilitating underaged drinking are different things," her father replied. "And I'm betting the actual business here is above-board, so they have to care about these things."

Then they were out on the dimly-lit second floor, and Taylor was too busy looking around to hear anything else he might have said. It looked like every club she had ever seen on TV, minus the crowd and with the addition of a bright orange-skinned guy lounging on a couch with some drugged-out women around him. He didn't have a shirt on.

She tore her gaze away from Newter before he noticed her, feeling her cheeks flush, and followed her dad to the bar. He still seemed perfectly at ease in this setting, which raised questions she was going to have to ask later, and slid the card across the bar to the bartender as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "Here to see Gregor, maybe Faultline," he said simply.

The bartender nodded and pointed behind them. Taylor spun around to see Gregor the Snail. He was much more obviously parahuman without his obscuring coats and sweatshirts, his skin partially translucent below the neck, and dotted with barnacle-like growths.

"I wasn't entirely sure either of you knew what was going on," Gregor said. "No hard feelings at the way we met?"

"We'll see," Danny said ominously. Taylor resisted the urge to elbow her father. "What, exactly, do you want?"

"Let's talk privately," Gregor answered, leading them behind the bar and into the hallway beyond. The room he brought them to was stark, furnished with an old-looking table, a few chairs, and nothing else. He left them there, slipping out the door with a grace that belied his bulk.

"Now is when we spill all sorts of secrets because we think we're alone," her father said, reclining in one of the chairs.

"You're way too good at this," Taylor muttered. "A little warning, or a _lot_ of warning, would have been nice."

"Come on, you didn't think this was my first parahuman negotiation?" her father asked with a mysterious smile. "Given my job, _our_ job…"

Taylor shrugged her shoulders, mindful of the possibility that they were being overheard. She knew, in a way, that being what amounted to the boss of the dockworkers union was a big deal, but she hadn't thought it was big enough to attract parahumans the way he was implying.

Gregor returned, leading Labyrinth, in full costume. A severe-looking woman in what Taylor could only describe as a battle-dress and mask followed after them, taking a seat on the other side of the table. Labyrinth drifted off to the corner of the room, moving slowly and taking no particular notice of anyone else present.

"Before we begin, I'd like to see a demonstration of whatever has Labyrinth so worked up," Faultline said.

Taylor looked to her father. He shrugged. "The ambiguity was good while it lasted?" he offered.

If she was being honest with herself, she was glad at least one of his oddly competent plans had failed. "Sure," she agreed. She reached out and grabbed a handful of table, pulling it back toward herself.

Labyrinth turned from her contemplation of the corner, facing Taylor directly. Behind the mask, Taylor was certain she was staring at the deformation.

Faultline took in Labyrinth's reaction with an impassive glance. "So it's a power interaction," she concluded. "You're not doing anything specific to get her attention?"

"This is just what I do," Taylor said. "I'm not trying to do anything specific." She did notice that the tip of her table-sourced spike had turned a honey-brown instead of the dark oak of the rest of it, though she hadn't stretched it all that far. That was a _little_ odd.

"What you do draws more of a reaction out of her than anything we have ever seen," Faultline said candidly. "On her bad days, Labyrinth can barely feed herself, let alone talk or react to anything quickly. Her good days are better, we might get a few words out of her, or a smile."

That didn't match up with what Taylor had seen, but she held her tongue.

"In the middle of a bad day, she left the Palanquin and made a beeline directly for the ship graveyard," Faultline continued. "She talked more than she had in the last week combined, and then the next day she dragged Gregor to a house. This is _significant_ improvement, and I am willing to pay to see exactly how far it can go, and if we are lucky, to determine why."

"Like a therapist?" Taylor asked. "But with powers?"

"Not a terrible comparison, but you may not be able to do much except get her attention," Faultline cautioned. "Or maybe you can help her communicate more regularly. Or something else entirely. We would have to see what you two can do before I commit to anything long-term."

"Would you be willing to pay us for a one-time experiment tonight, just to establish what you're hiring?" her father asked. "We can renegotiate afterward."

"That was exactly what I was thinking," Faultline agreed. "As for the method and amount you'll be compensated…"

She and Danny settled into a pattern Taylor had seen before, that of negotiation. She would have listened, but the unwavering stare Labyrinth was fixing her with was distracting. Instead, she tuned them out and began molding her bit of table, squishing and pulling it in her hands like silly putty. Little spikes started spreading out across the rest of the table, but Faultline just leaned back and continued talking.

Labyrinth, on the other hand, came closer. She reached out, running her fingers over the table near Taylor's hands. The wall near the door was beginning to turn into old, mossy wood paneling.

"We should move this to a larger room," Gregor suggested. "Assuming a deal will eventually be reached?"

Faultline nodded. "It is a matter of what, not if," she confirmed. "Go ahead."

"Stay safe," her father advised, quite unnecessarily.

Gregor led them across the hall and down another flight of stairs, into what looked like a garage that someone had tried to turn into a Greek palace. Marble, greenery, and other strange things intersected concrete seemingly at random. "This is as good a place as any, though you should try to keep your efforts constrained to this room," he advised. "I will stay to watch. Just in case."

Taylor nodded, distracted by the architecture. She reached out to one of the unfinished pillars, just running her hand across it. It was beautiful in itself, not like the things she usually made. Architecture, where she distorted reality like Escher.

Now there was someone she was glad had lived and died before Scion. Who knew what kind of power _he_ might have gotten, if a perfectly normal person like her could end up able to bring his works to life.

She realized that she was _actually_ smoothing over the jagged top of the pillar, rubbing her hand into the clay, and decided to go with it. There were plenty of examples of artwork around, and she could copy something right in front of her… Even if whatever parts she touched first ended up spiky by the time she finished.

Taylor lost herself in her work for a little while. A low humming started up from behind her, but she ignored it until she finished with one pillar; it was now sporting an irregular lump on top, the material drawn up from the base, which was thinner now. Her power _sometimes_ seemed to make more mass, but this was not one of those times.

Labyrinth reached around her, pushing the bulb of drawn material. Nothing happened, but Taylor turned to follow the other girl as she strode, with some purpose, toward a plank of rotting wood that had popped up nearby, jutting from the ground.

"Want me to work with this, too?" Taylor asked.

Labyrinth continued to hum tonelessly, which Taylor took as a yes. She reached down and tried to pull the plank from the ground, no powers involved, but it was stuck. So, she did the next best thing and took two handfuls across the room _with_ her, stretching out the wood between them like gum stretched thin.

There was a bright laugh from beside her, and she jumped a little when something hit the floor just as she was molding the wood onto the marble lump. She glanced over and saw that Labyrinth had tossed her mask aside and dropped her hood.

The girl was maybe fourteen, though Taylor wasn't good at determining ages from appearances so she might be wrong, and had platinum-blond hair paired with cloudy green eyes. Somehow, this was the first time Taylor had really looked at her, though she'd shown up to her house in civilian guise.

A dark pillar of what looked like obsidian jutted out from the far wall. Labyrinth pointed. Taylor knew what she wanted.

They continued like that under the watchful eyes of Gregor; Labyrinth would manifest something, a different type of material, and Taylor would stretch it out from where it originated to her conglomerate in the middle of the room. Wood, marble, obsidian, glass, rusted iron, dirty cloth… Some of the things Labyrinth brought out were disturbing, others beautiful, and Taylor got the impression she was only seeing the tip of an iceberg with each new addition to their environment.

Still, seeing a fraction of it or not, Taylor wove her web. She was forced to duck under past strands of stretched material to reach new sources, and some of her constructs looked impossibly unstable even in comparison to her normal fare, but it all went as it was meant to. Her power never failed, or snapped, or did anything but what she expected. The congregation of materials she was fashioning in the center of the room was eye-wateringly confusing to look at, but it wasn't actually harmful.

"What are you making in here?" Her father's voice broke her out of the pleasant trance of repetitive action and artistic design… But she didn't get a chance to answer.

"Making a lighthouse," Labyrinth said in her dreamy, faraway voice. "A guide. A crossroads. An eyesore. A beacon. For me."

"This is certainly something," Faultline observed from the doorway. "But it's getting quite late. Labyrinth, can you continue some other day?"

"It isn't something to finish, it can only be made better," Labyrinth said quietly. "But… A little longer?" She gave Faultline a pleading look that seemed to shock the woman more than anything else.

"It's past midnight, but I guess we can stay a little longer if you want to, Taylor," Danny agreed, taking a seat next to Gregor. "This is… impressive."

"I'm good to keep going," Taylor assured him. They had been working without speech this entire time, but now that Labyrinth seemed more talkative. "Where's the next source, Labyrinth?"

"Elle," the girl replied absently. "North. The glacial castle." She pointed to something off to the side, and Taylor saw an ice sculpture emerging from the ground, a horse with no head and six legs instead of four.

Taylor ducked under a thread of stainless steel and stepped over one of old clothing, placing both hands on the horse statue's cold front legs and pulling them away like taffy. She felt as if she could do this all night, and judging by the way Gregor and Faultline were beaming at Labyrinth, she might have a new job in the future. Even if she didn't quite understand what she and Elle were making.

* * *

"I see places," Elle said on another night. She had grown more lucid with every session, every addition to their room-encompassing structure of dreams and nightmares. Gone was the absent look, mostly, and gone was the girl who stood in corners and stared off into the distance.

In her place was an uncertain girl both unused to normal human interaction, and craving it. They kept up a constant conversation as Taylor sculpted, a task that was becoming more and more difficult with every new source Elle added. There would be a hard limit to the number of threads she could weave before she physically couldn't reach anything new; she was already resorting to making tunnels for herself through old lines just to reach new things.

"These places?" Taylor asked.

"These places, and many more, as many as I can imagine," Elle said slowly. "It's… immense. I can only bring things through if I choose a place and spend a long time… wandering. There are so many, and the places… I did not have good places, at first. I get lost. Wandering."

"And this beacon brings you back," Taylor concluded.

"No," Elle said quietly. "It is a… landmark. I still have to find it. But I wander, I go between places, and the more I… bring… here. The more have landmarks. The faster I can come back. The easier it is… to stay."

"So you can concentrate on what is going on around you, talking, and all of that?" she asked. In one hand, she held what might actually be cotton candy, and with the other she parted a path through the thicket in front of her.

"Yes," Elle agreed. "But… It is only… so useful. This landmark. When you're not here, it's… dull. When I go too far from it or you… dull. Now is the brightest."

Taylor though she knew why now was the brighter; she was actively weaving new components from other dimensions into the mix. She thought she understood what she was doing; if each of Labyrinth's dimensions was a page in a book, Taylor was gluing the pages together. Merging them in one specific place, so Elle could find the book's cover from any page without issue.

"I could do something to your clothing," she suggested. Her works were permanent, as far as anyone knew; Winslow's little art exhibit was still there, since the PRT had declared it clear of lingering effects and left it. Not like Winslow had the budget to hire contractors to dig it up and get rid of it; they'd just blocked the hall off for good and rerouted traffic.

"Maybe," Elle said doubtfully. "But I can't make my worlds happen on my clothes. Too small… Too precise. So it would just be… you. Good, but… not bright."

"And I can't break things off," Taylor said thoughtfully. That was one limitation to her sculpting that she hadn't found a way around; she could distort, pull, poke holes in, but not _disconnect_ -

"Or can I?" she murmured, looking at the pencil-thin strand of cotton candy she was dragging. She let go, and it stayed where it was in the air, held up under its own power… Wilting… falling to the floor because she hadn't connected the other end. It was just cotton candy now that she wasn't touching it.

She felt like a massive idiot for not thinking of this immediately. Getting a separate piece of the material was as simple as stretching it and then breaking it like a normal person would. Her power didn't make the things she distorted invulnerable, after all.

"We can make you clothes," she suggested. "Want to try it?"

"I do," Elle said with a smile.

* * *

After a productive Saturday spent at the Palanquin, Taylor was sprawled out on the couch at home. Danny was in the kitchen trying to fix something… Or maybe break it. Whatever he was doing required a hammer and sporadic thumping.

"Your first payment came in today," he said from the kitchen. "It's… a lot. We need to go set up a bank account for you."

"Yeah, but I was thinking that first payment could go to fixing things around the house," Taylor replied. She was getting paid a _lot_ for how easy the work, if it could even be called that, was. It came out to something like fifty dollars an hour, an absolutely ludicrous rate by her standards.

"I can't say we don't need to patch up a few things," her father conceded. "But after that… College savings?"

"Maybe." She wasn't doing so hot in school, though that was mostly the fault of the Trio, not her own academic shortcomings. They were still weirdly restrained with their usual taunting, but she was chalking that up to the commotion around her art not having died down yet.

Someone knocked on the front door; two hard taps and a third that was decidedly half-hearted.

"I've got it," Taylor called out, abandoning her spot on the couch. She checked the window first.

And it was a good thing she had, too; having a miniature panic attack at the blue-armored figure of Armsmaster was something best done _before_ he could see her. She could feel her eyes bulging and her heart pounding. Some of it was admittedly hero worship, but some of it was anxiety. The Protectorate had reason to be looking for her… Several reasons, though they almost certainly didn't know about her subcontracting to a group of mercenaries.

"It's… Armsmaster!" she yelled. And someone else, a shadowy shorter figure behind him. A Ward, probably. They were the furthest thing from important. "Should I open the door?"

"Wait, let me–" Danny came out of the kitchen wearing a respirator mask and wielding a screwdriver in either hand. He fumbled with the doorknob for a moment, and then the door was open and the leader of the Brockton Bay Protectorate was staring at them both.

"What can we… What can we do for you?" Danny asked breathlessly.

"We're here to conduct an interview regarding the Winslow vandalism," Armsmaster said stiffly. The Ward behind him – Gallant, in his own smaller set of armor – smiled at her. "It's a parahuman incident, and your daughter had a locker in the row that was destroyed."

"Is this a bad time?" Gallant asked.

"I was looking for mold under the kitchen sink," Danny said, pulling his protective facemask off to give them a nervous smile. "But that's not time-sensitive, you can do the interview now. Come on in."

As the two armored individuals passed into the house, he shot her a worried look. She smiled reassuringly; she never left any signs of her work out in the open. The most incriminating thing she had in the house was some _actual_ clay in a pot down in the basement, and she hadn't even gotten around to doing anything with that, powers or just by hand.

"This won't take long," Gallant assured her father as they trooped into the living room. "We're going through everyone with a locker nearby. Did you keep anything valuable in that locker?"

Taylor shook her head. "No. Nothing valuable." She didn't want to bring up the locker incident here; she had gotten powers in that locker, the same set of powers they were looking for now. Aside from that, and the dark joke she could have made about keeping herself in the locker one time, she didn't have anything to tell them about.

"Do you know anyone in that row who might have had reason to target you or another?" Armsmaster asked stiffly.

"Is this a joke?" Danny asked. "Or do you really not look up the people you're going to be interviewing beforehand? My daughter already _has_ been targeted."

Taylor winced; she might have thought to let her father in on her logic before he blurted that out, but it was too late now. "I'm being bullied," she admitted. "But this doesn't seem like it was aimed at me. They would just have destroyed my locker." All of which had the benefit of being true; she highly doubted any of the Trio would have done so much property damage. They liked to hurt _her_ , not the bystanders who covered for them.

"The hospital incident," Armsmaster said gruffly. Taylor wished she could see his eyes; his lower face might as well be covered for all the emotion it showed. "It wasn't registered as a parahuman incident at the time."

"And it wasn't, just petty children getting away with assault," Danny said bitterly. "Unless you're here to help with _that_ , too." His tone implied he would not be surprised when the answer was no.

"We'll be looking into any crimes that are our jurisdiction, and passing on the relevant information to the Brockton Bay police when said crimes do not fall under our authority," Gallant said smoothly. "And we _will_ be following up on that; it's a past event related to the lockers, which _are_ under our jurisdiction right now."

"The names of those who you accuse of bullying?" Armsmaster demanded.

For once, Taylor was perfectly comfortable answering his question in the spirit it was asked, no second-guessing herself. "Emma Barnes, Madison Clements, Sophia Hess. And everyone else in that shitheap of a school who stood by and didn't do anything about it, but I don't know if bullying can have accomplices, so you might not care about that."

"We'll definitely be looking into it," Armsmaster said neutrally. "Were you witness to any predictions, threats, or insinuations that in hindsight seem to have been referring to the parahuman vandalism?"

The questioning went on for a while after that, but Taylor got the feeling Gallant and Armsmaster were thrown off by the complaint about bullying. Gallant stared at her more than she felt comfortable with, and Armsmaster was far too brisk and impersonal with the speed he pushed through the interview, but neither pushed her on her own motives, or whether she did it herself.

More importantly, they left without accusing her of being the vandal or trying to arrest her. She considered that a win, regardless of how it came about. When they were gone she slumped back down on the couch.

"Well, that was tense," Danny remarked. "Maybe it will even turn up some actual dirt on the things that matter. Like Emma."

Taylor was thankful she'd gotten around to telling him about her bullies a few days ago; having that reveal dropped on him in the middle of the interview would have been really, really awkward at best.

* * *

"I felt that," Elle said absently after Taylor had finished telling her about the school incident, and by extension why Armsmaster had shown up at her home. She was sitting on a flat strand of brick that was apparently strong enough to support her weight, running her fingers through the patchwork quilt Taylor was making while Taylor molded on another chunk. It was coming out to look like a cross between a texture sample at a hardware store and plate mail, though Elle seemed to like the look.

"The school thing?" Taylor asked as she used her thumb to smush clay-like bricks around.

"Yes, it was… big. Pulled on… bad places. That's why I… didn't try to find it."

"I didn't want nice things when I was making it," Taylor agreed. She was coming to think that her power pulled from the same sources Elle's did, just without her knowing what she was going to get beforehand. Compared to how Elle's powers traded awareness for choice, she was okay with how her power had compromised.

"You want nice things now, though," Elle said quietly, picking at a thread at the edge of the quilt. "Do you think… Armsmaster, Gallant… Will they do anything about your school?"

"Probably not," Taylor said bluntly. "I don't expect them to. My problems are normal, and they don't _do_ normal." Though her problems had made her very much abnormal, so their approach was flawed… If that was indeed their approach.

"Why not… drop out?" Elle asked. "Hire a tutor. Faultline does for me."

"That's…" She would have said too expensive, but she had the money now. Plenty of it; tutors couldn't possibly cost more than she was making, and she didn't have any other expenses. Her dad wouldn't object, not when he wanted that money put toward education anyway. "Maybe."

"You can… afford it." Elle frowned, staring down at her hands. "I can, anyway. But…"

Taylor finished with the patch of brick and reached over for her next prepared bit of material. "Something wrong?" she asked.

"I am… More aware." Elle looked up, meeting her gaze. "Faultline, the others… They take care of me. But they take me on missions."

"And you don't want to go?" Taylor guessed.

"I _did_ ," Elle said. "But now… I don't. If it means leaving…" She gestured to the conglomerate globe in the center of the room, then to Taylor herself. "I don't… Want to go back to wandering. Not even for a day. But I make my cut… by participating. Helping. My cut pays for this."

Taylor wasn't sure Elle was supposed to be telling her any of this, as it sounded an awful lot like what Faultline had warned her against prying into, 'Crew business'. She didn't tell her friend – Elle _was_ her friend – not to talk about it, though. If she had to guess, being told _not_ to express herself would hurt more deeply than almost anything else.

"I… needed them." Elle tightened her hand into a fist, then relaxed it. There was a faraway look in her eyes, more than what was becoming normal while Taylor was around. "I care… about them. But I can be… closer to normal. Now. They don't need… almost normal."

The next bit of material sat on Taylor's palm, all but forgotten save for the constant pulse of her heartbeat encouraging it to grow little spikes. "You shouldn't have to go into fights and stuff if you don't want to."

"Shouldn't and… don't… are two different things," Elle said sadly. "I can… fight. I just don't want to do it… because I have no… choice." She reached out and took the little chunk of material from Taylor's open palm. "And the more I am… normal… The slower I am to… bring things here. So I can be Labyrinth… or Elle… But not both. Not at the same time. But I cannot… _just_ be… one or the other. If I am Elle, I am not… normal enough. To blend in without Faultline. If I am Labyrinth I am… wandering. Always wandering. I don't want that… either."

"You can't be a normal person because your power will give you away even like this, and you don't want to just be like you were before because it's stifling, not being able to focus on the real world." Taylor wished she had an answer for her friend, a way to make it all better, but Elle's dilemma wasn't something she could fix so easily. Even if Elle lived with her and her father, her power would give her away sooner or later, and the only reason Taylor could imagine her father supporting another mouth to feed was because she was counting on her payments from Faultline… which were coming on Elle's behalf, from her cut of the profits of being a mercenary. Which she wouldn't be, not in that scenario.

"Yes." Elle clutched at the quilt. "This is good… But it does not feel like it will be… enough. To be normal. Not even this room makes me… normal."

"Just to check," Taylor said warily, "you don't want to join the Wards, do you? Because they pay, they always say they don't force their Wards to fight, and they would want to make sure you could have a normal life." The Ward program promotional materials all emphasized how Wards were normal kids who led normal lives alongside their careers. Whether she believed it was actually like that or not, they surely paid lip service to the idea, and they definitely protected the identity of their Wards.

"That system… put me in… the Asylum." Elle shuddered, and a loose chain clinked somewhere in the room. Taylor had seen enough of Elle's 'asylum' architecture to know that was a deal-breaker on its own. "I am a… criminal. They would put me… back. Or worse."

Taylor had her doubts about whether Elle, in her mentally fogged state, could be held accountable for her actions as directed by others… But she also had her doubts about the system she'd be trusting to take that into account, so it evened out.

"Can't stay with you…" Elle continued. "No money. I'd out you. And I'd out me. All sorts of… problems. Won't join a… gang. Can't live on… my own. Stuck here."

"You're not stuck," Taylor promised. "I'll help you figure something out." If only because she finally had another friend, and she wasn't going to lose her. Not when she felt so trapped and helpless…

Taylor wasn't going to look away and pretend it wasn't her problem. Even if she had no idea how to go about helping Elle.

Well, _one_ idea. A stupid, dangerous idea.

* * *

Taylor could hear the gawking gaggle of girls from half the hallway away. They were standing at the edge of the roped-off area, watching the Protectorate finally getting around to removing the locker art.

Said effort was attracting a crowd because the Wards were participating; Taylor suspected as much for the PR as because they might genuinely be needed, should something about her sculpture prove hazardous. Not that it would, but they wouldn't be sure.

The Wards in question were Gallant, who was single-handedly responsible for ninety percent of the attention, and Vista, who was the one who caught _Taylor's_ attention. The deceptively small girl in the costume and visor was the next closest parahuman to her and Labyrinth in Brockton Bay, and Taylor had never seen her in action.

Today, that was going to change, and Taylor happily ignored the warning bell for the start of class to stay and watch. It made sense that they had called in Vista; an absent gesture and the lockers had shrunk from a wall-spanning mass of disturbing art, to a ruler-spanning diorama on the floor… and touching the ceiling… and the walls. The space had shrunk, not the lockers themselves. Or maybe extended was a better word; Vista tossed a little plastic ball into the area, and it shrunk as it bounced to a truncated stop.

Like looking down a telescope at something, but the telescope was flat and invisible, and it was all still there. Vista undid the distortion after a long moment, and it all popped back into place. A moment later, she was twisting space in a different way, grimacing at the abomination in front of herself.

"Come on, to class, to class," a teacher cried out, emerging from the sanctuary of her classroom and shooing the gawkers – and Taylor – away. "Don't bother them, you're all tardy already."

Taylor let herself get pushed along with the crowd, then ducked into a bathroom and returned the way she had come. Vista and Gallant were still there, and a few normal workers were busy sawing away at the place where molded locker met equally molded wall. Taylor remembered pulling out the wall in several places to add to her creation; they were going to have to cut out a lot more than that if they wanted to get rid of her distortion altogether.

"Hey…" Gallant came over to the police tape barrier between them, his armor clanking every step of the way. "Taylor, right?"

"Yeah, that's me." She was glad he remembered her name, but not at the same time. "I uh, have a question. For a friend."

"Really?" He stepped over the barrier. "Is this the sort of question your friend doesn't want overheard, or can it be asked here?"

"Not overheard," Taylor responded. This was _stupid_ , she was only putting more suspicion on herself, but she had to ask and Gallant was at least familiar enough with her to believe she actually wasn't asking for herself, once she got into the details.

Gallant, by way of reply, ushered her behind the line and into an unaffected, but very much empty, classroom within the blocked-off section of hallway. It was an English class judging by the posters, but not one Taylor had been in before.

"I'm all ears," Gallant said, smiling kindly at her.

"My friend," Taylor emphasized, distinctly aware of the irony of the situation but not at all amused by it, "has powers. Her powers aren't… good for her. They make her distant, _really_ distant, to the point where she might say a word or two a day and need to be taken care of. She's fifteen."

"That sounds familiar," Gallant said, but his easy smile had slipped into something a little more genuinely intrigued.

"She _was_ like that," Taylor continued. "But now she's not, someone figured out how to help her out of it. She can function again, mostly. But while she was barely aware of what was happening, some people took her around and used her powers to commit crimes. She doesn't want to do that anymore, but they take care of her and she's really scared of going to the Protectorate, because she thinks she's a criminal."

"That's…" Gallant paused. His mouth opened, but no words came out for a moment. "Right," he finally finished, swallowing whatever else he had been about to say. "Nothing I say here is legally binding, obviously, but I would point out that what you're describing sounds like a Master power, except self-inflicted. We don't blame people for the things they are made to do under suggestion. Even if we did, we would probably still take her in as a Ward. You say she can function more or less normally now?"

"It isn't perfect, but it's close enough," Taylor said firmly. "She needs to set up certain things to stay lucid, and it might not work so well if she leaves the same building, but she's improving."

"That…" He shook his head. "I'm going to level with you, that's hard. Not the criminal part, she'd get off in any court of law and I highly doubt anyone in the Protectorate would want to charge her once they verified her story. But everything else, her power and staying lucid… The Wards are definitely the best place for her, but I can't promise the higher-ups will see it that way. She might end up somewhere else better suited to providing for her needs…"

"An asylum," Taylor said bitterly. "Yeah, fuck that. Trust me, that's not going to fly."

"No, I don't think it would," Gallant agreed. "But there are ways to make sure that doesn't happen. Assuming you know the right people."

"Those being…" Taylor gestured for him to continue.

"Let's say, hypothetically," Gallant offered, "That you know another teenage parahuman who isn't in the Wards yet. Maybe she did some vandalism, maybe she had a good reason, or maybe she's fresh out of the woodwork. She's friends with this friend of yours, mutual friends. If they both went in _together_ and brought somebody good at negotiating, all they'd have to do is make sure the 'partner' clause of their Ward contracts is included."

"That saves my friend from even the slightest chance of going somewhere she doesn't want to be?" Taylor asked, choosing to ignore how blatant he was being. He might just be bluffing, or trying to get her on his side to track down the vandal, he didn't necessarily suspect it was her–

"The partner clause is usually for vigilantes or independent heroes who will only join if they're not split up," Gallant explained. "It's written into the contract because there were a few internal issues a few years back with a rivalry and a team leader trying to get rid of one of such a pair while keeping the other, despite the promises that were made when they signed on. In your case, getting that clause would mean that to send your friend anywhere, they would have to send your _other_ friend too. And nobody can swing getting a perfectly capable Ward sent to a mental institution just because her partner might be special needs."

"That sounds… exploitative." Not that she considered exploitative a bad thing; in this case, it was perfect. If she couldn't trust the Protectorate to do the right thing by Elle, she could _force_ them to defer to her.

"It only works if your friend really can function normally with a little help," Gallant warned. "And your other friend would have to keep on top of making sure she has what she needs. You're circumventing the regulations that are meant to help people with special needs, so they won't be as helpful as they should be."

"They can handle that," Taylor said firmly. A way to protect Elle _and_ get her into an environment where she could live without being forced to fight or worrying too much about money…

Something occurred to her, something important. "What if she's an orphan?" she asked. "My friend."

"The Protectorate can let her live with one of their employees; there's a vetting process anyone who indicates their willingness to foster Wards can go through, so there would be options," Gallant explained. "But if that hypothetical friend was a very good friend with a stable home situation, they could take her in and she would probably be more comfortable. The Protectorate would provide additional funds to take care of her."

"That's good to know, assuming any of this happens," Taylor said carefully. "And if it doesn't?"

"Well, we'll keep looking for the vandal, who really ought to make a public appearance and announce a better name before that one sticks," Gallant said with a small smile. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about her, would you?"

"It's probably a guy," Taylor shot back. "They like to wreck things. Have you checked the football team yet?"

"Winslow has a football team?" Gallant asked.

"No, they all got suspended for mass drug usage last fall." _That_ had been a bit of drama crazy enough to distract Emma for a solid week. Taylor remembered it fondly. "So they've got reasons to act out, right?"

"Right…" Gallant eyed her suspiciously. "Good luck with your friend."

"Thanks for the advice." She really was thankful. He had handed her an answer, even if it would require her putting in something of her own to make it work.

Let it never be said she wasn't willing to inconvenience herself to help a friend out of a bad situation. She had vandalized lockers for less, and it would be annoying to have to vandalize her own locker for hypocrisy…

Especially as her locker was currently being cut out of the wall by men with hacksaws.

* * *

Two weeks later – it didn't feel like two weeks, it felt like a whirlwind that took place over a matter of hours or months – Taylor found herself in the back of a van, sitting next to Elle. Labyrinth, rather, though in a very different costume.

Gone were the green cloak and professionally-done costume; in their place was a coat of many colors – and textures and weights, a coat that Elle assured her was an absolute pain to balance – and a dirt-cheap domino mask. Taylor wore a similar outfit, though her coat was much less carefully crafted, since she didn't need it to be quite so intricate. They were a matching set, as per the image they needed to convey.

Elle was off wandering on some foreign plane of existence; her attention was more _here_ than it would have been if she were on her own without the cloak, but she was still slow to react and even slower to talk. Taylor spent what little fraction of the ride wasn't taken up by worrying on mentally designing a better landmark for Elle. A crown, maybe, a miniature version of the setup they had in the Palanquin. There was something about the process of merging all of the pieces of different worlds _together_ that got Elle's attention, more than just putting them all close to her but separate on a piece of fabric.

The van stopped; Gregor the Snail looked back at them from the driver's seat. "Your stop, girls," he said somberly. "Good luck, and remember, if you don't like how they treat you, we're not averse to being hired for kidnapping at a nominal fee."

"So long as it's us?" Taylor asked.

"So long as it's you," Gregor confirmed with a reluctant smile. "I hope you find what you're looking for, Elle."

It took Elle a few seconds to respond, but she _did_ speak. "Sorry… to leave…" she said slowly.

"We were good for you for a time, but you are growing, and we will not hold you back," Gregor replied. "We can only hope to move forward as you have."

The van's door opened with a simple tug on the handle, and Taylor stepped out, before helping Elle down and closing the door. Gregor drove away, leaving them in front of the PRT building. Hand in hand – mostly because Elle needed the direction – they walked into the building and up to the front desk.

"Here for our twelve-thirty," Taylor said to the woman behind the computer. "Sculptor and Muse."

_**Author's Note** _ **: You know, I didn't mean for this to be a 'joining the Wards' type of story. I started with Elle's predicament, then just approached it the way Taylor would have. She really didn't have a lot of options, so Wards it was!**

**On a separate note, I really liked this alt-power in particular. It's not super overpowered, not as strong as Vista or Labyrinth, but it's** _**interesting** _ **. It would be even without the multidimensional aspect, honestly. Or maybe I just have a thing for someone whose superpower is being able to mold the world like clay beneath her hands. If I was ever going to write a full alt-power story, this would be the alt-power I'd pick… So maybe someday another story of mine will reuse the power idea.**

**Alternatively, this setup might have the narrative space for a follow-up at some point; it wouldn't be a continuation of this story so much as an exploration of the idea of this alt-power Taylor and Labyrinth in the Wards in general, if that makes any sense… Eh. You may see this idea returning, is what I'm saying. There was a 'serious rivalry with Vista' subplot I didn't end up using...**


	4. Most of the Time

**_AU: Most of the Time_ **

Daniel Hebert woke to the strident blaring of his alarm clock and dark skies outside. He wasn't a fan of early mornings, for all that his job required them and had for the last two decades, and he found himself daydreaming about being able to make it noon whenever he wanted as he showered. It wasn't impossible; parahumans existed, and anyone could become one if the cards played out right. With the right power, day would come at his call.

But that was just a daydream; most people never got powers at all. Aside from those lucky few who did, the rest of the world had to do with their normal lives and normal solutions. Like getting a job that didn't require he be at work before the sun was up… But that would mean abandoning the Docks. Thus, he suffered in silence.

The house was quiet and mostly dark as he puttered about; he took the time to turn on all of the lights, but it still felt empty. Taylor's backpack sat in her kitchen chair, where she had last put it. He left it alone, though it smelled faintly of old juice. A spill, maybe an accident or maybe something else… Old now, whatever it was. If it wasn't so cold out, he'd have expected it to attract flies. A problem for later in the year.

He made a modest breakfast, enough scrambled eggs and toast for two, and ate his half. The other half went on a plate and into the fridge. That done, he donned his coat, gloves, and hat, and trudged out into the early morning darkness to get his truck started.

The old machine didn't want to start, but he twisted the key in the ignition just right and tapped the gas a few times, and it rumbled to life. He'd have to get it looked at; such idiosyncrasies were usually the precursor to something going horribly wrong, no matter how easily he adjusted to and ignored them. Better now then after it all broke down and left him with nothing but a hollow sense of regret.

It was cloudy out, depriving him of even the consolation prize of seeing the sun rise between the decrepit buildings that lined his commute. He didn't particularly like his own neighborhood, or the old streets leading from it to the docks. The buildings were sagging, the streets faded, the storefronts defensive and often closed… If he had more money, he would have long since moved himself and Taylor into a better part of town, to hell with all the muttering that might have caused about uppity union bosses not knowing the plight of the common worker. Getting a better house wouldn't have been for him, it would have been for Taylor.

But that old argument was irrelevant, and he didn't need to be stoking his temper this early in the morning, so he focused on the drive. It helped that the streets were pocked with little craters that required his attention to avoid, some natural and some the result of being a city with a high density of capes. If he looked carefully, he could tell the difference; the real, natural potholes were things of neglect and erosion, while the cape-made potholes were violent, broken impact points, lined with jagged edges. Though the cape potholes would at least draw attention to the streets they damaged sooner rather than later, being so much more dangerous. The normal potholes might otherwise go years without being addressed.

The lot by the union office buildings, a modest place situated in the midst of the dockyards, was already sporting a dozen different trucks in various states of disrepair. Danny parked close to the building, tugged his gloves tight, and made the short trek into the building. Today was a work day like any other, and he had a busy day ahead of him…

And an important meeting after work was over with. He couldn't forget that, though part of him wanted to. Instead, he threw himself into his work and let it slip away from his thoughts.

* * *

It turns out to be a very quiet morning, all in all. He had managed to get a contract for half the men under him, one out in the richer part of town as extra muscle after an all-out cape brawl, so the number of union members stopping by to ask for things, chat, or offer their condolences was lower than normal.

He busied himself making inroads on the stack of paperwork contracting labor out to the city entailed. Government regulations needed to be followed, and most of them fell to him to check up on and ensure. Drug testing, for one, though there was a new complication in the form of an amendment to the procedure for 'cape-dense areas' to account for TInkertech drugs… His men would either take the test and come out clean, or 'take' the test and come out clean, so it didn't really matter to them. He was the one stuck figuring out what changes would need to be made to the usual procedure.

As it was, he was in the middle of filling out a confirmation form on a totally different matter – because staring at the phrase 'Tinker-derived narcotics' was going to drive him insane if he didn't take breaks – when one of the men loitering about in the Docks burst into his office.

"Empire coming up the street, headed our way," Lars said briskly. "Ten guys, and Krieg at the head. They wanna talk."

Danny ignored how Lars could possibly know that – he would be a fool to think there were no Empire sympathizers among his men, and Lars was at least blatant about it – and stood. "Men gathering to bar them from entry?" he asked.

"I called everybody I knew was around, they'll be there," Lars assured him. Another point in his favor was that he was too stupid to lie effectively; Danny knew he was telling the truth in this instance.

"Go join them," he ordered. Lars couldn't make any trouble if he was in the middle of a crowd of defenders, while he could be convinced by his 'friends' to look the other way if stationed somewhere on his own.

"On it," Lars said, turning and leaving the building. Danny followed right behind him, only stopping once to retrieve a certain something from the safe behind the front desk. On another day, he might have forced himself to stay behind, but today… Today, he was feeling the urge to go out and deal with this personally.

The Empire members had been stopped within sight of the Union office building; a dozen skinheads were lounging on top of two stopped cars, glaring mulishly at the dockworkers spread out blocking the road. Said skinheads weren't sporting any visible weapons, while the dockworkers hefted pipes, wrenches, and the occasional nail gun, but that was a farce. There would be handguns and worse concealed under coats on both sides, waiting for an opening of hostilities.

And then there was Krieg; the Empire cape, an import from London if the rumors Danny heard were right, was standing between the two cars the Empire had shown up in, waiting patiently. He wasn't wearing his usual costume, instead decked out in a stereotypical trenchcoat and domino mask. There would be some sort of explanation for that, a seemingly reasonable one, but Danny already knew the real reason. So long as nobody spotted an obvious cape from above, there was little to no chance of interference from a hero. Krieg was inconspicuous, this way.

Danny made it to the human barricade. He could have waited for Krieg to speak, but he just didn't feel like waiting. "You're blocking the road," he called out, stepping into the open.

"Ah, my friend," Krieg said gravely. "Hebert. It has been too long since we talked."

"The answer is no," Danny retorted.

"To a talk?" Krieg asked. He shifted, looking back at his men, then to Danny. "Do you really wish to be so dismissive? We are only working for the betterment of all who deserve it."

"Cut the crap, or at least stop dressing it up," Danny shot back. "We both know what you want, and again, the answer is no. The dockworkers make no alliance, take no favors, and give no favors to any gang."

"You speak loudly for the position you are in," Krieg said softly. He stepped forward, and Danny forced himself to hold his ground. Krieg's powers, a sort of movement dampening effect with many different uses, were strongest around himself. Him getting closer was a threat… But it was also a risk.

"And I only came to offer my condolences," Krieg said carefully. "One wonders… Do you know how people such as I come about? Or do you know, now?"

"I assume it's either ingrained bigotry or weak-mindedness exploited by men without scruples," Danny said firmly. "Or if you're talking about people like you… No."

"That is almost a shame," Krieg sighed. "You would be much more interesting an opponent than many of those who oppose the natural way of things. But you know that you are– "

He cut himself off when Danny pulled out the slender little piece of machinery he'd taken from the safe. He held it close to his body, keeping it out of view of the rest of his men.

Krieg scowled fiercely. He didn't like the sight of a Tinkertech laser pistol.

"Most people never get powers, but we can make do," Danny said firmly, brandishing a weapon that Krieg's personal aura couldn't stop in the slightest. Acquiring it had been a dicey process, but utterly vital once Krieg came to town under the Empire; his powers were a hard counter to the usual strategy of focusing conventional arms on a cape. Bullets slowed to a crawl when they got close.

Lasers did no such thing.

"This will end in bloodshed," Krieg warned.

"Yes, and some of it would be yours," Danny retorted coldly. "The Docks are no gang's plaything. Not the ABB, not the Merchants, not the Empire. Go fight someone else."

Krieg looked at him, and at the men waiting behind him. He shook his head with a put-upon sigh. "I am not so stupid as to unduly provoke a man with so little left to lose. You truly do have my condolences. We will return some other day, when you are more amiable to discourse."

"Fancy words don't hide ugly intentions," Danny shot back.

Krieg shook his head dismissively and sat in the passenger seat of one of the cars, closing the door behind him. That seemed to be the signal for the rest of his men to get back in, a process that Danny might have compared to clowns stuffing into a clown car, were he in a joking mood. As it was, he watched carefully until the cars turned a corner down the road and were out of sight.

A collective sigh of relief – and potentially some disappointment, a good half of his men had personal reason to hate the Empire – went up among his men. They began to disperse, though many were only going back to their posts. Nobody was ready to relax yet.

"That was the gutsiest thing I've ever seen," one of his men yelled from somewhere nearby. "God damn!"

He didn't smile; the cold, somewhat hollow satisfaction in his heart was enough.

* * *

Quitting time rolled around and lingered while Danny finished up the last of his daily allotment of paperwork; contrary to what some people might have assumed, he still had work to do after driving off the Empire. One potentially life-threatening confrontation with a cape did not immediately warrant the rest of the day off, not in Brockton Bay.

By the time he was actually getting ready to leave, it was growing dark outside. The night guard was pulling up in the parking lot, his deceptively small car divulging an absolutely hulking man.

"Danny, heading out early?" the night guard called out.

"Got somewhere to be," Danny said tersely as he got into his truck, not appreciating the crack about his frequently overlong hours. "Keep an eye out tonight."

"Heard you spit in a few eyes today," the guard called out as he got the engine started. "Careful, man, that ain't safe."

"Nothing's safe." He pulled out of the lot and left the guard behind. The drive home was as uneventful as always; save for a bit of residual traffic, he had missed rush hour and all it entailed. He got home without incident, which was good. A part of him had expected the Empire to ambush him the moment he was out of his 'territory' and presumably without his Krieg countermeasure. Not that they would send Krieg; Hookwolf was much more that sort of cape.

He didn't care; it would happen or it wouldn't.

The house was brightly lit, but still mostly empty. Taylor's backpack was back on the chair, where she had last put it. There was a dull discoloration on top that he only noticed in the waning light from the windows, and he wiped his finger over the coarse material to discover the source was a fine layer of dust.

The answering machine was blinking. He went over and hit the necessary buttons to play back the messages; it wasn't often people bothered to call his home phone.

"Danny, this is Alan," a familiar voice said stiffly. "I've been trying to get in touch with you, just… answer my calls, okay? We can work this out without–"

That message wasn't worth listening to; Danny hit the delete button the moment he got the gist. Nothing new there.

"Mr. Hebert, this is the Brockton Bay police department," a dry, no-nonsense woman said in the next message. "We're going to need you to come in for further testimony at your earliest convenience."

There was more, but it was all of the contact information he already knew. He eyed the notepad by the phone just to make sure the scribbled numbers and addresses there matched what she was saying, then deleted the message.

That was all. Disappointing, but not unexpected. At least nothing urgent had come up; he didn't want to miss his appointment.

He shuffled through the kitchen, throwing together a basic sandwich, just something to make sure the hollow rumbling in his stomach wasn't too distracting. He'd forgotten to pack a lunch that morning, but he'd also forgotten to eat lunch, so it all worked out. While he was at it, he tossed out the old scrambled eggs and toast on the plate in the fridge… It hadn't been eaten.

He left the house, locked the door behind himself, and got back into his truck. The drive was longer this time, to a place he didn't go daily, though he'd gone there a lot more often as of late. An appointment he wasn't going to let himself miss.

The sun was setting by the time he made it out to the cemetery. Orange and yellow washed across a cloudy sky, dull but there. He sat between two gravestones, the cold, hard ground freezing him through his pants, and watched the sun set.

A strange shape flew into view, slowly crossing the skyline. A floating figure carrying another, bridal-style. Glory Girl and Panacea, based on what he knew of the city's capes and who might be carrying who around in plain sight. The intimidating flying brick and the miracle cure.

He knew a little about them; Alan had known Carol, they worked together. Victoria had gotten powers after being fouled in a basketball game. He didn't know how Panacea had gotten hers, but it would be something similar. Second-generation capes got powers easier, it took a lot more for first-generation capes. Something like that.

But it all depended on chance, in the end. Or in the beginning. Some people got superpowers, some people were able to fly before they hit the ground, to punch through walls before they were found, to fight back when they were cornered and helpless…

Some didn't. Most didn't.

He sat there, cold and silent, until the world was dark, and then lingered longer, until he couldn't feel his legs for the cold numbness that came with sitting as he was. Numb like he was on the inside, most of the time.

He closed his eyes, sighed, and forced himself to keep moving, to abandon the two graves. No matter how he felt, he had to keep going.

Some people got powers. Everyone else had to make do without.

**_Author's Note:_ I tried to leave plenty of hints – direct, contextual, and even one meta – as to what this little one-shot is really about, but I didn't want to spell it out. So I won't. Just know that, if you didn't already catch what wasn't directly said, there is more to this.**


	5. Pushing Back (part 1)

**_Alt-Power AU: Pushing Back (part 1)_ **

The docks were cold and mostly abandoned, even in the middle of the day. Taylor paced back and forth in front of the administrative building, watching her breath ascend to the cloudy sky above.

Her face was cold, but her nose was tingling for more reasons than one. She crossed her arms and shivered. She had left the office waiting room a few minutes ago, just to check whether someone would come get her… Nobody had come. Her father might have, but he was busy negotiating with the CEO of some uppity building company. There was a big deal in the works, something _huge_ , and he had to be here.

Even though she had just gotten out of the hospital. That just meant he wasn't willing to leave her home alone. She might have complained if she wasn't so eager to stay out of the house.

She walked aimlessly, a mental list running through her head, one tainted with dread. A dozen socks, one set of sheets, three sponges, and a variety of disposable products, mostly wrappers and cardboard boxes.

That was the up-to-date tally of all the things that had melted, spontaneously shredded, or _disintegrated_ when she touched them.

She had power, that much was blindingly obvious, but she didn't know what it did or how to turn it _off_. Only being able to move the 'source' of said power around her body had kept her more valuable possessions from being destroyed by a touch, and as it was she couldn't afford to blow her nose, for fear the tissue would turn to ash again. She could move her power to her hands, or her feet, but then something would break...

Nobody was coming; she stepped away from the building and casually walked over to the nearest warehouse. There was no work going on today, mostly because there was no work to be had, so it was empty save for some bare pallets, a few crumbling piles of brick, and scattered bits of trash. The big sliding door wouldn't close behind her, but she really just wanted to get out of the wind… and away from prying eyes.

She had to figure out what her power _did_ , and after an incident with a piece of paper spontaneously combusting on the kitchen table, she couldn't test it at home. This would do instead.

All it took was a little bit of mental effort to will the point of concentration from her nose to her hands. It was done before she even really thought about it, which was a mistake. She could feel herself _pushing_ at her gloves, even though her hands weren't moving and she wasn't really pushing on anything. There was a pressure, a tactile sensation that made her feel as if she was putting pressure on something, something that slowly yielded.

Before her eyes, the close-knit gloves sagged, faded in color, and began fraying at the seams, even as she struggled to pull one off all the way. Five seconds passed, the gloves rapidly deteriorating. A sudden blotch of pale purple stained the left, but not the right, and then the right lost a finger entirely, revealing the thankfully unchanged flesh beneath–

Both gloves disintegrated at the same time, turning into puffs of black ash that mostly fell off her hands. Sixteen and ten seventeenths of a second from start to finish, though that was an inconvenient form of time measurement… She didn't know anything better, and she didn't know how she was so certain that was how long it had taken.

What she _did_ know was that she was out a pair of gloves. Another thing to add to the list. "Great," she complained to the empty warehouse.

She wished she had brought something to write on. She also wished she had taken her gloves off halfheartedly trying and watching the change in fascination; something about watching her power weather and change objects was mesmerizing, and it distracted her at the worst possible times.

She walked over to the pallets and put her hands on them. The change was slower this time, partially because she had exhausted the built-up 'charge' she accumulated by not doing anything with her power over time. She didn't quite know yet what charging her powers before using them actually _did_ ; they still worked after she had used up all of the charge, with no obvious change in function.

The wood rotted before her eyes, starting in the cracks and progressing rapidly. Then the pallet split in half along a jagged edge. The piece she was still touching continued to age–

Age.

She watched with wide eyes as the wood withered and rotted before suddenly turning to dust like everything else did. One minute, thirteen seconds and two thirds of a fourteenth second. Her power wasn't destruction, it was _time._

She aged things. She looked at her hands, her bare, innocent-looking hands, and shuddered. She _aged_ things; it wasn't outright disintegration, but it was close.

If only that belated epiphany was all she needed to fully understand her powers. Some of what she had accidentally done in the last week suddenly made sense, but some of it didn't. Paper did not spontaneously combust just because it got old. Wooden pallets didn't split down the middle because of age, as far as she knew.

A theory came to mind, spurred on by old memories of movies about time travel. Maybe it wasn't just _age_ ; maybe that piece of paper would have been set on fire in the future.

She turned in a slow circle, taking in the warehouse with new eyes, but there was nothing there to test that particular theory on. She didn't even know _how_ she could test whether that was how her power worked. If she pushed something forward in time, but before she did it she resolved to do something to it regardless of what happened, would she be able to see whatever she did when she pushed it forward?

There was an old candy bar wrapper on the ground. She tore it in half, then set the two distinct scraps on the pallet.

The left scrap she resolved to leave intact, and the right she resolved to rip into shreds before she left the warehouse. She was firm in her intentions; regardless of what happened, she was going to do those two things.

Then she put one hand on each of the wrapper pieces and pushed them forward in time. The one on the left shriveled slightly. The one on the right failed to manifest new rips or anything else. Instead, it shriveled just like the other. Both burst into heat and curled up on themselves at the same time.

She jerked her hand away - thirteen seconds and seven tenths - and rubbed them on her coat to cool them down. Then she picked the shriveled, rightmost wrapper up and painstakingly shredded it, just to be sure. She would never know if her experiment worked if she didn't follow through; the little she knew of time travel, mostly from movies, said as much. Time had to be a complete loop, or an unbroken loop, or… something. If she quit a test halfway through because it didn't look like it would work, it was possible it only looked like it wouldn't work because she had quit...

Still, she had already seen it fail. Whatever mind-bending paradox might be behind her power, she hadn't managed to figure it out.

"I don't get it," she complained to the empty warehouse. It was well and good to finally know the basics of what she was doing, but she had hit a wall with what she understood. Maybe the failure of her test meant she was just aging things, not moving them forward in time, but maybe it just meant she hadn't tested it right.

In a fit of pique, she snatched up another piece of trash, an old chip bag. It was faded and probably had blown in from outside at some point. Instead of pushing, she tried to do the exact opposite and _pull_ , under the reasoning that if she could do one, she could do the other. She clenched her fingers on the plastic and tried to _yank_ where her power insisted on shoving. Something clicked over, and it felt as if she really was pulling.

The chip bag brightened, smoothed itself, and then after twelve seconds exactly, sealed itself. She pulled it open again, but there were no chips inside.

The significance of the fact that she had just successfully pulled something _back_ in time was initially lost on her; the first thing that came to mind was that she could probably fix all of the things she had ruined around the house.

The second was that she could make the house furniture as good as new.

The third was raising the dead.

It was a crazy thought. It was a wild dream that couldn't possibly work out. Her power wouldn't work that way. She had no proof it did.

She rushed out of the warehouse anyway. There were plenty of alleys around the docks, none all that safe but none particularly interesting either, and she made a beeline for the nearest one, ignoring the wind swiping at her face and hands.

What she needed, what she was looking for, was a dead animal, anything that had lived but didn't anymore. She needed something to prove herself wrong. There was a technical term for powers working on organic or inorganic things, she was sure of it, though she couldn't remember what it was. It couldn't work, it wouldn't, she was just getting herself worked up over nothing. But she had to _prove_ that to herself to really believe it.

There was a pile of trash next to a dumpster, and laying next to that pile was a very much alive alley cat. Clutched in said cat's paws was a bird carcass, gnawed on and very much dead.

Taylor picked up an old boot and threw it at the cat, trying not to dwell on what she was doing. The cat abandoned its prize and fled for the mouth of the alley, though it stopped to watch her spitefully, clearly waiting to return to its territory and reclaim its dropped prize. It hissed at her when she crouched by the dead bird.

She felt like hissing right back at it, if only to do something stupid and break the nervous tension that had fallen over her. One finger poked the bird's deformed breast - she had wild thoughts about accidentally aging diseases and in the process mutating them, and resolved to wash her hands as soon as possible - and she pulled with the power that pooled there, doing something indescribable to anyone without her same ability. She felt it keenly this time, her whole being focused on the task at hand.

The wounds popped out of existence; a chest snapped back into its normal convex shape. There was a loud squawk, then a sharp pain in her finger.

Taylor yanked her finger back, clutching it tightly with her other hand. The bird had pecked her.

The bird flew away, only to land on top of the dumpster.

The cat gave them both an evil glare that promised revenge.

"Fuck." She squeezed her finger, a sharp, unfamiliar feeling flooding her body. Not pain, that she knew all too well.

Hope.

She could raise the dead.

There was one dead person in particular who immediately leaped to mind. It had been years… But years weren't a problem for her, and neither was death, it seemed. All she needed was to touch.

Taylor hurried back toward her father and the office building, back to the negotiations that might mean work for a few dozen dockworkers, maybe for all of them if this Calvert guy was serious. She couldn't care less.

Life had given her the chance to take something back, and she wasn't going to waste it fooling around in alleyways.

* * *

Taylor stomped across the graveyard, the boots she had borrowed from her dad's closet heavy and ill-fitting on her feet. The old overcoat she had taken at the same time as the boots was similarly ill-fitting, but at least she had returned it to good-as-new condition. The opposite could be said for the scarf she had draped across her lower face; she had pushed it forward until it was barely holding together. The shovel she was dragging behind her was just as old, the head covered in rust, no power manipulation required.

There was more, she had taken pains to disguise every little detail that might point back to her, but at its core, her disguise was a pair of boots, a coat three sizes too wide for her and one size too short, and a scarf. A modest ensemble with which to publicly give the concept of Death a firm rebuke and a time-out in the corner.

The graveyard was empty at this time of night; she had made sure of that. Three days surveillance had left her tired but certain she wouldn't be disturbed until dawn, at the very least. The place she had chosen to set up in was further secluded, near the middle of the graveyard.

Near her mother's grave. But not too close; she had an ultimate goal that all of this preparation was serving, and it wouldn't do to fail because someone had noticed a name on a headstone in the video she would be shooting.

She set up her burner phone – though calling it a burner hurt her deep down, given how expensive a phone with even a mediocre video-taking capability had been – on a headstone, propping it up to have a clear view of two gravestones and the mounds in front of them.

Next, she took her shovel to the leftmost grave. Digging down to the coffin would have been an exercise in frustration and exhaustion, but she used her power to cheat. She had spent days experimenting, practicing, and generally thinking about its uses, and she'd figured a few things out.

As far as she could tell, the graveyard was going to be excavated, or blown up, or otherwise removed from existence in about four months; anything she used her power on there turned to rubble or just vanished, which was the reason one of the headstones had moved two inches to the left the previous night.

Her power didn't work on the ground itself, but chunks of dirt she fully separated from said ground were a different matter. A few months of pushed time and they turned to dust, or just disappeared. It was downright frightening - she didn't know what would happen to do that, since dirt definitely didn't normally disintegrate over the course of a few months - and she fully intended to pressure her dad into taking them on a vacation around that time, but it was useful.

When she hit wood, old but distinct, she stopped digging. All she needed was a place to stand, even if it was on top of the coffin; she was resigned to this entire affair being disgusting in the extreme.

By the time she had excavated the other grave, it was two in the morning. Nobody had noticed anything amiss; she wasn't surprised, she knew the Graveyard was never patrolled by cops or guards, but it was still good to know her plan was proceeding according to her designs.

It was good to focus on what was going right, because otherwise she would be shaking in her oversized boots with fear and anticipation. This was going to paint a target on _someone_ 's back, and all her planning was just to move that target off of herself… and her mother. If it went wrong, if she hadn't thought something through, she didn't know what would happen. Nothing good.

But it was too late to back out now; two unearthed coffins sat at the bottom of two strangely-shaped holes, and she didn't _have_ dirt to fill the holes in with even if she wanted to. There would be no hiding her tracks.

She stuck the shovel in the ground between the graves, checked over her disguise once more, and had her phone start recording. Only prior practice - of course she had practiced everything she possibly could before working up the nerves to do any of it for real - told her the blinking red light meant it was working.

She stepped into the phone's field of view, moving with a limp. Not a fake one, though that would have been a good idea, a real one because apparently oversized boots caused blisters. She said nothing; her voice might have given her away. Instead, she gestured to the headstone of one of the excavated graves.

On it was inscribed 'Thomas Raines, 1963 - 2005, Beloved Father of Three'.

Once she had let the camera look for a few seconds, she walked back over, took the camera in her hand, and clambered down into the hole, moving slowly so that everything would be more than a dark blur. It was still dark, but at least it wouldn't be blurry.

This was it; her power wasn't charged, she had used up any charge on clearing the graves out, so she put her hand on the coffin and pushed, slowly and steadily. It aged.

Wood shriveled up and began to pucker, deteriorating in ways Taylor didn't understand, and then as she hit the several-month mark, disintegrated like everything else in the graveyard would.

She had planted her boots in the sides of the hole, not on the coffin, so she didn't fall. A shapeless bundle quietly thumped to the bottom of the grave, white and dark and–

She closed her eyes, breathed through her mouth, through her scarf, reached down, touched the most disgusting thing she'd ever felt in her life, and pulled _back_. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months… None of it as simple as that in her head, steady beats of a relentless clock, an endless heartbeat, speeding up the longer she pushed, going back longer, _longer_ –

The flesh was cold beneath her hand, then it was warm. There was a thrashing, a deep-throated scream. A kick to the knee that might have hurt if it had been done intentionally, but as it was it consisted of an impact and a dull pain that paled in comparison to the thing happening below her.

He stopped moving shortly after the faltering kick. She opened her eyes and saw a man lying in the grave, bearded, hyperventilating, clothed – which she hadn't thought about, so she was glad she had brought his clothing back too – staring at her. His eyes were wide, his mouth worked silently.

She ended the recording with shaking fingers, then turned the phone off for good measure.

"Thomas Raine, I need your help," she said, her voice sounding high and tired and _scared_ even to her own ears. It had worked, some part of her hadn't expected it to work, he wasn't comatose or dead again of shock or mindless or a zombie like she had feared. He seemed scared, but _alive_. And now she had to keep going, because her mother was lying in this same graveyard waiting for her–

"What?" Thomas asked. He sounded as scared as she was, and far more confused. "What do you need?"

"I'm a parahuman that can bring back the dead, and I only have until dawn," she told him, backing out of the hole. He followed as if in a dream, his entire body trembling. "I need help digging up the coffins."

"If I help, do I…" He turned and saw his own gravestone. He gulped audibly and turned back to her. "Do I stay?"

"You stay regardless," she assured him, worrying now that bringing him back had some sort of Master effect. She had expected thrashing, screaming, threats, tearful confusion, him running off or something else suitably nonsensical. Not fear and compliance.

"I'll help," he said, grabbing the shovel from the ground. "How did I die?"

"Caught in the crossfire of gang violence," she said shakily. She had looked up her first few prospective revivals, to ensure she brought back able-bodied adults who seemed kind and might actually want to assist her. She had been thorough, so that when it failed only her power would be to blame, and now that it was _working_ she was glad to have her planning to fall back on.

"Are my kids still alive?" he continued, skipping over the other grave she had dug and going to the next. He wasn't a muscular man, but he still virtually tore through the dirt in comparison to how ineffectively she had dug.

"All three, yes." She moved over to the second grave and clambered in.

"Clair?" he asked more fearfully.

"I couldn't find her online," she admitted, leaning down to push her power into the coffin. Talking to Thomas was surprisingly calming; it gave her something else to focus on. Something more mundane, at least in comparison. Proof that what she was doing _worked_. "Doesn't mean she's gone, just means she's not as active on the internet. I'm sure your kids will know more." He had married young and had children young; all three were adults now. Two seemed to be estranged from the third, but she hadn't dug too deeply into that. It wasn't her business.

"Why me?" he asked quietly, so quietly she wouldn't have heard them if the graveyard wasn't so completely silent aside from their voices and the sound of his shovel biting into the dirt.

"You seemed like a good person and I needed to start with someone," she said.

"Funny," he muttered. "I didn't feel like a good person. Not good enough to be brought back from the dead."

The coffin's wood disintegrated under her hands, and she was met with another corpse. She closed her eyes and pulled, speaking as she did. "Good enough for me." But maybe she just had low standards.

* * *

Humans, she had heard once from someone who didn't yet realize she was both a social pariah _and_ not into math in the slightest, didn't _get_ exponential growth. They barely, as a rule, truly understood addition. There were studies, he had said, oblivious to the fact that she was only listening because it was human interaction with a peer not yet tainted by Emma, that proved people couldn't empathize with a thousand starving children any more than they could with one. That they didn't understand what exponential growth really was, either. It was all addition, and therefore not quite _understood_. Or something like that.

She knew what he meant. She had done the math; if one person dug up a grave for her while she was bringing back another, and that new person helped too, and so on, she would rapidly go from spending most of her time digging to spending all of her time reviving people. It wasn't quite exponential growth, but it was close enough that now, having lived it, she still didn't fully understand how it had happened.

The sky was beginning to grow light in the East; people were spread across the graveyard, excavating coffins with shovels, with borrowed tools from the graveyard upkeep staff shed, with their bare hands. Dozens roamed the graveyard, selflessly helping her instead of seeking their families or going to the Protectorate as she had advised those who didn't want to stay and help.

There had been surprisingly few of those. Hearteningly few, really; she didn't know what it was about being brought back from the dead, but it seemed to bring out the best in some people.

The sun was coming, and she casually – or as casually as someone exhausted from doing the impossible could be – walked over to the next grave. Throughout the night she had given certain names for her helpers to seek out, ones she had looked up that sounded likely to pitch in. Most of those she had revived already. One had been excavated, the coffin pulled out and opened so she didn't have to waste time on getting to the body, but not yet revived.

Annette Hebert, the reason for all of this, though if she had played her cards correctly nobody would ever suspect it.

"Sweety, offer's still open to carry you," an older woman called out. "Or bring them to you."

"I can walk," she objected, limping up to the coffin. It still scared her, how helpful so many of the people she had brought back were being, but she had asked and they had said they didn't feel a _need_ to do as she said, or anything like that. One memorable revival had ended with the man she brought back spitting in her face and cursing her out before fleeing, so she was mostly certain there wasn't any sort of Master effect, but it still bothered her.

Not as much as _not_ doing this would have. She stuck her hand into the coffin, felt around, and pulled. Her mind wandered as she pulled time back from the body, the one body she had come here _hoping_ to save, not simply planning to save as a smokescreen.

There was movement, then a sharp scream. Two women, one a therapist and one a nurse, quickly reached in and helped her out, then gave her a quick rundown of what was going on.

Taylor forced herself not to look, or listen, or acknowledge her own mother in any way. It helped that none of this felt entirely real; she could pretend it wasn't Annette. For her own sake; she had no illusions that the Protectorate would be questioning everyone here, and if anyone saw the new cape embracing _one_ revival but none of the others, or even showing her some sort of interest, it might put her mother in harm's way.

She limped on, only barely catching that her mother would be staying and helping. That made her feel good; her mother was one of the good people.

Then the sun peaked out over the horizon. Many of the people around her stopped moving, sighed, or otherwise stopped working. Word had gotten around that this was a miracle that would end when the sun came up. More misdirection, and an excuse to leave before anyone caught on. She was already amazed that nobody had come, nobody had seen what was happening. She had expected something to go wrong.

Something almost had; she almost hadn't made it to her mother before her self-set deadline.

Everyone was looking at her.

She shook her head sadly and turned away from the coffin she had been walking toward. A great sigh went up from her… helpers? Followers? Rescues?

"Okay, everybody," a gruff man called out as she walked away. "I can't tell any of you what to do, and I know plenty of you want to go find your families, but I can tell you my former bosses would have my hide if I didn't say that the Protectorate is going to want to get all of you into medical observation, just in case. Follow me if you want to get a head-start on that and get out sooner!"

"They gonna take the girl, too?" a gruff woman demanded.

"They'll want her," he replied. "But if she wants to come in, it's her choice. I'm certainly not going to force her."

Taylor kept walking. Not to the PRT building. To home, where she would ditch her costume, collapse into bed, and fail to sleep until it was time for school. Then she would sleepwalk through school, because she was dead on her feet.

It had been worth it.

* * *

Piggot glared daggers at everyone in her crowded office. Armsmaster got daggers to the faceplate of his helmet, Miss Militia to her eyes, Velocity to his chest for variety's sake. If glaring daggers was a power, everyone under her command would have been wise to hope she never got it. She would rival Jack Slash out of pure irritation.

"Explain to me how this happened," she said coldly. "Specifically, how we didn't know about it until a mob of recently-dead people turned up at our doorstep."

"Nobody tampers with the graveyards ever since the 'no valuables in graves' policy took effect," Armsmaster reported, his voice clipped. "It was decided that monitoring graveyards was a waste of manpower. The odds of a biotinker or biokinesis user pillaging graves are abysmal. The freshly dead are more useful in every conceivable way, and we _do_ have guards on all sources of such."

"The ABB and Coil's mercenaries were clashing near the Docks all night," Miss Militia volunteered. "We spent most of the night trying to break it up."

"The Undersiders pulled off another string of robberies on the other side of town," Velocity added. "I was busy trying to keep them corralled until backup arrived."

"Said backup was busy with the ABB since Lung had just decided to show himself," Miss Militia said. "The response teams were all pulled to deal with the aftermath of his brief appearance."

"My Brute Tranquilizer field test was a success, and the next iteration will drop him in under sixty seconds regardless of escalation," Armsmaster concluded. "Tonight was a total success on the topic of the ABB, and I am a few weeks of Tinkering away from hard-countering Brockton Bay's single biggest threat."

"Enough." She resisted the urge to lean back in her chair, just as she was resisting the urge to beat Armsmaster's helmet against the table until he learned to look at the bigger picture. The worst part was that, on a different night, she wouldn't be mad at all. All of that was totally reasonable and generally positive news. Lung was one step closer to a defeat that didn't end in him retreating or burning the city down, Coil had showed his hand in a way that angered the ABB, meaning more inter-villain conflict in the future to grind both sides down… The Undersiders getting away was bad, but Velocity totally depriving them of their spoils was good.

"Any other night, we wouldn't be having this conversation," she said darkly. "Because any other night, we wouldn't have _totally missed someone raising the dead under our noses and getting away with it_!" She slammed her hand on the desk, eliciting a loud crack. To their credit, none of the heroes flinched.

"We have all of the revived under Master-Stranger isolation protocols," Armsmaster offered. "Preliminary results show no signs of degradation or biotinkering, or indeed any signs of death at all, or fatal wounds, healed or not. They also exhibit no obvious loyalty to the parahuman who brought them back, beyond that to be expected of someone who saved their lives and asked for nothing but a few hours of manual labor in return, and that optional."

"And the video?" Piggot inquired.

"One of the revived had a phone, one that was purchased only two days ago," Armsmaster continued. "The video on it was shaky and hard to make out, as typical of phone cameras, but the parahuman can be seen. No obvious gender, and no voice to analyze because they don't speak. Either caucasian or disguised to seem as such, we see their hand, and not a Tinker unless they went to great lengths to disguise their tech as a Striker ability. Said ability is used twice, once to disintegrate the coffin, and once to rejuvenate the corpse. Analysis is still pending on anything more in-depth than that, we've only had it for a few hours."

"So we know nothing important," Piggot growled. "We don't know why they chose that graveyard, whether there was any method to who was brought back or not, or who they are. We don't even know if the people brought back are under a subtle Master effect or totally clean. And the moment the press gets ahold of this story, there will be demands from dozens of family members to see their loved ones, and then to release said loved ones."

"Sounds about right," Velocity agreed. "But… why is this a problem? Sure, it's inconvenient for us, but they're bringing civilians back from the dead. It's not like they've gone and dug up all the biggest villains of the last ten years or something."

"They also haven't come in to submit to power testing and after that to bring back all the _heroes_ who have died in the last ten years," she retorted. "Any idiot would think to do that if their power actually worked that way. There has to be something else, either a villainous leaning or a power limitation. Neither inspires confidence." No, there had to be something else. A reason he or she wasn't using their power for good. She would bet anything that what they wanted wasn't going to be good for Brockton Bay.

* * *

Taylor sat awkwardly on the couch. Her father paced in front of the windows, gazing out at the drab, empty street beyond. It was a school day, a work day, but the phone call they had received the night before ensured both that neither of them was willing to go anywhere, and that neither had gotten enough sleep to function normally anyway.

The Protectorate, after a week of announcements, waffling over safety, and scientific mumbo-jumbo on the rare occasion they foisted someone knowledgeable upon the reporters, was finally letting the recently revived leave custody. One Annette Rose Hebert, along with all the others but Taylor didn't care about _them_ , had been given a clean bill of health, and was coming home. She was being driven away from the Rig right this moment, in an unmarked patrol car so as to avoid the press, and the releases were being staggered for the same reason…

Whatever they were doing, it was enough that there weren't any obvious reporters waiting outside for the reunion. There _would_ have been, if anyone knew Taylor was the mysterious parahuman responsible for all of this, but that secret remained safe.

They had christened her parahuman identity 'The Gravedigger,' in reference to the only thing she had ever been known to do, and there were hundreds of reported sightings all across the country already, not a single one confirmed. The costume sat at the bottom of her closet, buried in a pile of dirty laundry any self-respecting investigator would avoid pawing through. It certainly hadn't been to New York, or Mexico City, or Las Vegas, or any of the other places she had been 'seen.' It had only been used once, that night in the graveyard.

She didn't plan on ever going out in costume again. Any future appearance would be fraught with danger; she doubted she could do anyone any good if every criminal organization in the world descended on her the moment she went out as The Gravedigger. It just wasn't safe or practical…

And if she was honest with herself, she didn't feel the urge to find a way around that particular set of problems. There were too many dead, too many deserving people, too many _undeserving_ people, and then the resource problems of bringing any substantial number of people back… It just wasn't worth it. Not on a large scale.

She had what she wanted. Everything else was just a smokescreen, and she didn't need the smokescreen anymore. Maybe it was selfish, but the world had never given _her_ anything for free, so she didn't feel obligated to give back any more than she already had. Not for now.

Her father stiffened, his hands grasping the curtains like he was going to throw them apart and smash his way through the window. A car door thumped outside. He rushed to the front door, his hand flexing uselessly over the doorknob.

Taylor remained on the couch, anticipation freezing her in place. Her heart thumped, and she shifted her building charge erratically, trying to figure out where was safest to keep it. She continued to spend some of it on pushing the couch back, a few days every few seconds, nothing more but enough to keep it from building, but she would have to stand and she didn't know what affecting a living human would feel like.

The doorknob twisted; she reflexively shoved all of her lingering power into her socks, which disintegrated instantly as she shoved them forward in time. Her feet were bare, but so long as nobody stepped on her toes she could forget about her terrible, obtrusive _miracle_ of a power.

A familiar silhouette stood in the doorway, framed by the grey skies behind her. She was wearing plain clothing, and her hair rustled in the wind. There was someone behind her, waiting by a car, in uniform and completely unremarkable.

"That was a particularly long drive," her mother quipped weakly, her wide mouth quirking into a soft smile.

Taylor found herself standing and hugging her mother with no understanding of how she had crossed the room, or gotten past her father, or anything else, and she knew it wasn't her power at work, just her overwhelming joy.

_**Author's Note** _ **: This is only the first half of what I had planned for this particular one-shot, but it's getting long and this is a natural cutoff point, so I suppose it's now a two-shot. Ah, well. I can and do promise a second part, it'll be coming sooner or later.**

**Also, in case anyone is wondering: Taylor's power is** _**not** _ **as simple as 'moves things back or forward in time'. Oh, it does that, but it does so in the usual entity-power style of things, and isn't a solution to entropy… meaning there's more going on beneath the surface. I'll have a full power breakdown at the end of the second part to this prompt, so as to not spoil the complications that serve as the catalyst for said second part.**


End file.
